How To Get The Most Out of HIIT

It is often said that learning how to lose weight is sometimes needlessly over complicated. Despite the numerous scientific advancements we have made in the last 20 years, the old classic formulas still return the best results. One of those formulas is HIIT.

Just like resistance training, there are various ways to perform this style of workout and your overall fitness goal will determine which method is best suited for you. Most people don't learn these different methods and therefore don't see any results. Today we will teach them to you.

If you visit any gym around the world you will find two distinctly different types of people working out. Firstly, you will meet those who are happy to spend up to an hour working out at a steady pace on an exercise bike. Secondly, you'll meet those who deem cardiovascular exercise to be too boring and therefore they ignore it and train with weights instead.

High intensity interval training represents a middle ground between both styles.

Who should be exercising this way? Well, to a certain degree absolutely anybody can get results with the many variations of interval training which are out there. It has been proven to burn fat at an increased rate and also to increase lean muscle tissue, so regardless of your overall fitness goal there is undoubtedly a place for this in your workout routine.

The main reason this type of training is so popular with those looking for the fat loss benefits it offers comes down to something called Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption, or E.P.O.C. for short. When you perform steady state cardiovascular activity you generally stop burning off calories at an increased rate the moment you finish your activity. With high intensity interval training, however, your body actually continues burning those calories at an increased rate for hours after you leave the gym, therefore increasing fat loss results.

Take a look below at the most common variations of interval training and you will be able to apply one of these methods to your own training routine easily.

* The 4 minute workout developed in Japan, known as Tabata's.

* The Sport Specific Method

* The Fat Loss Method

The Tabata method is designed for elite athletes or extremely fit individuals who are looking to increase an already high level of fitness. When you reach a level which is considered elite, you will notice gains are far harder to come by. For instance, think how hard a bodybuilder works to add an extra quarter of an inch to a muscle before a contest.

The Tabata method originated from Japan and was able to increase the VO2 Max of a group of elite athletes by a shocking 28% in just a few weeks.

Tabata intervals can be performed on any piece of equipment and the total workout time, minus warm-up and cool-down periods, is only four minutes long. Those 4 minutes contain of eight 30 second sections, each consisting of 20 seconds at maximum intensity followed by 10 seconds of light recovery.

If your goal is to improve performance for a sport then there is a slight variation on the Tabata method which will work well for you. This involves performing a longer workout, between 20 and 30 minutes in total, which combines a cardiovascular activity as your high intensity work and a resistance exercise as your recovery. One good example of this would be to combine a 400 meter sprint on a rowing machine with 30 seconds of push-ups. That particular session is used by many professional rowing clubs.

Finally, there are numerous people who are looking to use this training method to lose body fat. The method which has the most scientific research to support it comes from Canada. A thirty minute session which consisted of four minutes at a moderate intensity followed by a thirty second burst of maximal intensity returned superior results to any other time split.

Furthermore, regardless of whether your goal is weight loss or building muscle, recent scientific studies show that performing high intensity interval training before your resistance training increases the body's natural ability to perform both of the goals listed above.

Learning how to lose weight can be a tricky affair, with so much contradicting information in circulation. The three styles of HIIT given in today's post have the most scientific evidence to support their benefits and, depending upon which category you fit into, you will be able to fit one of these into your existing weights routine.