When you enter the fitness world, you realize that the trends are always changing. It’s as if every other month there’s a new ‘miracle’ exercise. Well, I assure you there’s no one exercise fits all, but when it comes to HIIT (high intensity interval training) the benefits may be too good to ignore. HIIT is the sequence of brief, highly intensive spurts of exercise followed by longer periods of rest or less intense cardio. Imagine sprinting or cycling for 20-30 seconds with maximum effort then walking or slowly peddling for 1-3 minutes. Repeat this cycle a few times and you’ve done a HIIT workout. “Based on everything we know, there's no substitute for these exercise programs when it comes to delaying the ageing process." Says study senior author Sreekumaran Nair, a medical doctor and diabetes researcher at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota. "These things we are seeing cannot be done by any medicine." So it seems, whether your goal is simply upping your fitness level, preventing cardiovascular disease, strengthening muscle, optimally losing fat or keeping your blood sugar in check, HIIT may be …show more content…
Under different intensity levels the body utilizes different fuel sources. Low intensity exercise, for example if you’ve ever seen 60% printed on a treadmill (referring to 60% of your maximum VO2 output) utilizes fat as the main energy source to power you through your workout. As the intensity of our exercise increases our body can’t process the conversion of fat to glucose quick enough. Therefore as our intensity level goes up we start relying on a quicker conversion to glucose; carbohydrates. At the time the interpretation of these findings was somewhat logical, exercise at low intensities to burn fat in addition to the prospect of training for longer periods of time and increase total energy expenditure. Well that was easy, all said and done right?