High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), otherwise known as High Intensity Training (HIT), or simply Interval Training is all the rage in the fitness industry and has been for quite a few years.

People have left behind traditional cardio programs in their droves to concentrate more on working hard for not too long instead. It doesn’t mean these more traditional cardio methods do not have merit or a place in someone’s program (they often do and can) but, let’s face it, in this day and age, clients often want the biggest bang for their buck while in the gym with their trainers, and HIIT often delivers.

So, why does it work and how should you use it?

How Interval Training Works – Lactic Acid, Oxygen Debt, and Recovery

Our first post is from back in 2009, from Rusty Moore, with an excellent simplified description of how and why interval training works. If you need to understand the basics, start here.

Click here to read the article.

Steady-State Cardio Vs. High-Intensity Interval Training

A balanced article looking at the benefits and disadvantages of stead-state cardio and HIIT. As you probably already know, it’s never best to stick to one protocol, and this article helps explain why that might be when it comes to your cardio.

Read here…

HIIT Cardio: Fed or Fasted?

Kiefer taking us through a recent study and letting us know that it looks like, as long as you’re actually doing the interval training, it doesn’t matter if you’re fed or fasted.

Read here.

HIIT ideas!

In our final entry, we’re sharing a lot of links in one go, to give you further ideas to use and take further inspiration from, and to see how very differently people use intervals effectively.

The Poliquin Group have written lots of excellent content, some of which we’ve shared in the past, and here’s two more blog posts with some rules to adhere to to achieve results (Five Rules for Losing Body Fat With Sprint Intervals), and some intervals workouts to use based on your goals (Three Superb Sprint Interval Workouts To Achieve Your Best Body).

We’re sharing a Craig Bannatyne trio of interval training posts (he’s written a LOT on this subject), with a post giving a full suite of interval training guidelines and a ranked order of best exercises to use for intervals, another sharing some best practice ideas for HIIT and then a final post with five different interval methods for you to try out with clients. Great stuff for bootcamps.

We thought this post from Tom Venuto writing back in 2010 as to why he prefers a more moderate high intensity approach was worth sharing.

Meanwhile, Jim Gerard discusses the “10-20-30” HIIT training formula and whether it might just be awesome.

And here’s Alwyn Cosgrove explaining the five different types of interval training used at his gym, and how they’re utilised.

Finally, here’s Michael Boyle keeping it simple and extremely effective with 3 sets of Airdyne intervals and Eric Cressey with a very short post linking to other stuff he’s written on different interval training ideas. All worth a quick read.

There’s some different information here. Remember, you write your workouts for your client population and what’s best for them! Experiment within reasonable parameters and always track client results!

That’s it for this time around! We’ll be back in another week or two with another round up post. In the meantime, remember to follow us on Twitter, where we share lots of interesting trainer related links daily. Why not drop by Facebook and LinkedIn, too?