High-intensity interval training (HIIT) – not for beginners

Who does not know the drawbacks of the traditional interval training? The intensive phase is rarely intense enough to be truly efficient. The exposure times of up to one hour harm our hormone balance, and our muscles – which can have no sense!

Those who freely talk about the negative effects of the classical interval training, but still want to take advantage of the positive side, should try “high intensity interval training” (HIIT).   In this variant a training lasts at most for a quarter of an hour. This sounds alarmingly easy, but you will soon enough realize that HIIT is absolutely not suitable for beginners.

Suitable for exercise are bike, stepper, cross trainer, spin bikes and other cardio equipment.   The training schedule is tight, you begin with a three-minute warm-up and then it goes directly into a one-minute interval load. If after this you can breathe easily for a minute, you’ve obviously done something wrong. After you’ve exhausted till you drop, do not dump a break. You close to a one-minute recovery interval. Recovery does not mean that you can fall asleep while running the motions – you should slow down the intensity a little.   Then closes again a one-minute interval load , and so on. The whole thing repeats it until about nine or ten minutes.

In the end it still depends on a casual cool-down phase for a quiet two minutes. The HIIT gets the best results when it is pulled immediately after getting up. That may sometimes be quite annoying, but worth it.   If you do not know exactly whether you physically fit at all for such a high-intensity interval training then let a doctor examine your condition.