What Is HIIT Cardio Training?

The latest craze in cardio training is without a shadow of a doubt HIIT. You may have heard the term before but you may not know what it means. HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training and as good as the name sounds, the technique of training is even better.

HIIT is considered to be the ultimate form of cardio training for those who are really serious about improving their physical fitness. It takes less time to perform and burns more calories than the more traditional forms of cardio. When I say traditional cardio I mean those exercises everyone dreads like jogging or cycling at a steady pace for an hour. It's repetitive, boring and it's just not as effective as HIIT.

Here's an example of a HIIT workout routine that will result in you burning more calories and improving your stamina much more effectively that traditional cardio training. The example we use will focus on jogging, for the sake of clarity.




You might begin with five minutes of steady paced jogging first, just to warm up your muscles and prevent injury. After this five minute period of warm up you then up your pace so that you're sprinting for thirty seconds. Once you've sprinted for thirty seconds you then slow back down to the steady pace for two minutes. After you've been jogging for two minutes you start sprinting again for 30 seconds. You keep repeating this process for as long as you can manage and then finish walking so that you cool down correctly. This sort of cardio training really gets the heart pumping and after completing it just once you'll be able to feel the benefits HIIT provides.

Because HIIT training works so well and improves your stamina so quickly, you will find that you need to up the intensity sooner rather than later. Using the example above you could reduce the time between sprint sessions from two minutes to ninety seconds. You can keep reducing this over time so that your sprinting time and your jogging time are dead even. This is a technique that many long distance runners use to build stamina quickly as well as to develop a strong sprint finish.

The only thing you need to be careful of with HIIT is that it can be easy to overtrain your body. Overtraining is when the intensity of your exercise exceeds your body's ability to recover. To combat this you should start your HIIT workout routine slowly. Start with fifteen minute blocks and see how your body feels after a couple of sessions before you up the length of time you use HIIT. Also be sure to get enough sleep to allow your body to fully recover.

Now you know what HIIT cardio training is, and how to do it, try it today and get the most from your workouts.

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