HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) is the ideal workout for anyone who has a busy schedule and finds it hard to fit in time for exercise. Research has shown that you can achieve far more by doing a 15 minute HIIT workout three times a week than by jogging on the treadmill once a week for an hour. High Intensity Interval Training involves alternating between very intense bouts of cardio based exercise and low intensity exercise. A HIIT session consists of a warm up period of exercise, followed by three to ten repetitions of high intensity exercise, separated by medium intensity exercise for recovery. The high intensity exercise should be done at near maximum intensity and the medium exercise should be about 50% intensity (e.g jogging). I usually get clients to perform each exercise for 40 seconds with a 10 second recovery period. You can repeat this for as long as you like (generally between 4-30 minutes depending on level of fitness and intensity of each exercise).

There are loads of benefits of HIIT. The biggest benefit is that it’s a great fat burner due to its high intensity nature and limited recovery periods. HIIT also leads to increased aerobic capacity (the amount of oxygen your body can use is increased) and increased lactate threshold  (your body is better able to deal with increased lactic acid buildup in your muscles). As an added bonus, there’s also an after burn effect known as EPOC (excess-post exercise oxygen consumption), which means that you speed your metabolism up and burn more calories for up to 24 hours after interval training session.

HIIT training is great as it can be done without any equipment or a gym. If you do have access to a gym you can add in exercises which use equipment like benches, medicine balls, a BOSU, ViPR’s etc but you can still make the workout just as challenging by using bodyweight exercises. Here are a few exercises to try within your HIIT training sessions:

Jumping squats

Plyo jumps

Press ups

Burpees

High knee run

Star jumps

Squats with side kicks

Boxing

Double handed kettlebell swings

Squats with medicine ball throws

Barbell/ViPR clean and press

Sprints

Crunches

Mountain climbers

Plank – come up from elbows to hands and back down again

Skipping

The good thing about HIIT is that you can give yourself a brilliantly effective workout in a limited amount of time and without needing a gym so now there’s no excuse not to exercise regularly!