Amanda Loudin

CNA/NEW YORK TIMES – Workout trends come and go, but when it comes to the biggest bang for your buck, high intensity interval training (HIIT) has staying power.

HIIT’s specific origins are uncertain; some say it dates back to at least the early 1900s and Finnish Olympic runners who would use alternating short bursts of intensity with brief bouts of recovery to bolster their overall speed. Today, it remains one of the ‘Top 20 Worldwide Fitness Trends’, according to the American College of Sports Medicine.

But ask 10 people what a HIIT workout is, and odds are, you’ll get 10 different answers.

The fitness industry has created a wide variety of iterations that aren’t actually HIIT.

A true HIIT session will incorporate several rounds of short high-intensity cardiovascular bursts – usually not more than 20 seconds – followed by brief periods of rest. This allows you to complete a workout that delivers substantial fitness results in just 30 minutes or so.

It usually requires little to no equipment, and you can pick your preferred method of cardio.

To achieve true high intensity, however, you have to work hard. You must get your heart rate above 80 per cent of your absolute maximum before letting it barely recover, and then doing it all over again. “Make your intensity hard enough that you can’t hold a conversation, then recover and begin again,” said trainer and coach Danyele Wilson for the fitness app EvolveYou.

“That’s key, and what sets HIIT apart from other workouts,” said Wilson. “Holding a plank for a minute isn’t going to get your heart rate there, for instance. You need to feel like you couldn’t go all out with this movement for more than eight to 10 seconds at a time.”

When added to a regimen of standard cardio exercise and strength training, HIIT can boost your overall fitness, improve health metrics, increase your calorie burn rate and lead to better performance in competitive sports. Here’s how to reap those benefits.

WHY HIIT?

The chief argument for a HIIT workout is its potential to produce cardiovascular fitness gains in a short amount of time.

A 2019 review of research studying the health benefits of HIIT found that it was a more efficient approach to aerobic training, compared to steady-state cardio exercise – which keeps your heart rate in the same general range for an extended period.

A small 2020 study of sedentary men between the ages of 43 and 73 found that performing HIIT over just six weeks significantly decreased their high blood pressure.

In addition to improving heart health, many people choose HIIT as a means to lose weight, president and chief science officer Cedric Bryant of the American Council on Exercise, said.

“You’re getting a higher average calorie burn from HIIT than a steady-state session for the same amount of time.”

And while this may be true, the best reason to incorporate HIIT into your exercise routine, according to Wilson, is to improve performance, whether you’re a competitive athlete or not. Performance, she explained, means training your whole body to move efficiently and with more agility.

“It’s improving your capacity to move well in different directions,” she said. “That can mean anything from LeBron James on the basketball court to an elderly man preventing himself from falling after tripping. It’s about quality of life.”

That said, you may want to talk to your doctor or physical therapist before incorporating HIIT into your workout.

WHAT IS “REAL” HIIT?

There’s a lot of confusion around what counts as HIIT. Some gyms or trainers refer to any circuit training – a variety of exercises done one after the other – as HIIT. While these workouts might be difficult, most won’t get your heart rate high enough to qualify.

For instance, a runner sprinting for three- to five-minute spurts with rests in between is running intervals, but not doing HIIT.

CrossFit is another workout people commonly mistake for HIIT, said Wilson. “CrossFit is not HIIT, although a CrossFit workout may enlist an HIIT circuit within it,” she explained. “But they are not one and the same.”

An actual HIIT session – the short-bursts portion of the workout that causes a high heart rate – may be only 10 minutes long, especially for beginners.

However, “you will also take five to 10 minutes to slowly warm up with gentler movement, perform the HIIT circuit, then cool down for five to 10 minutes”, said exercise and health scientist Sabrena Jo with the American Council on Exercise.

HOW DO YOU GET STARTED?

For those new to HIIT, once per week is a good starting point. While you can do a HIIT session by itself, Wilson often does one at the end of another workout.

“I might pair it with leg day, for instance,” she said, doing “super sets” of combined movements like squats and lunges, and then finishing with a 10-minute HIIT workout.

Once you are comfortable with them, aim for two to three sessions per week, but not more, said personal trainer Holly Roser in San Francisco. “After that, you could become more susceptible to injury.”

Avoid HIIT if you have a cardiac condition, are recovering from injury or regularly experience vertigo. If you’re pregnant, consult with your doctor beforehand.

In the beginning, you might have to shorten the length of an interval or two to catch your breath, said Roser, or find yourself slowing down toward the end of a session.

But after about a month of regular HIIT, you should be able to get through one and notice an improvement, for instance, in how fast you can run, bike or row on an ergometer. By then, you can try tweaking the ratio of exercise to rest so that you rest for shorter periods of time.

You can perform HIIT at home, at the gym or in a group class setting, and it requires little to no equipment – though if you have access to a treadmill, bike or rowing machine, they work well. Short bursts of running, jumping jacks, burpees, mountain climbers or squat jumps can also be effective. This makes HIIT convenient, and also easy to do when travelling.

Remember, these workouts are meant to be hard. In the moment, pushing yourself to 80 per cent of your body’s maximum heart rate may feel intimidating, but it can also feel rewarding, said 31-year-old Brooklyn sales professional Melissa Vasquez.

“I like to do a workout that scares me a bit,” she said. “After finishing a HIIT session, I feel very satisfied for facing down that challenge.”

If you’re new to the HIIT format, a good way to ease in is to pick a single cardio-focussed machine or exercise. The treadmill is often the least intimidating for beginners. After a warm-up, try sprinting as fast as you can for 10 seconds, then walking or resting for 50 seconds. Repeat this six times.

That’s it, you’re on your way to mastering HIIT. As you get comfortable, try shortening the rests to 20 seconds, and then even 10.

TABATA WORKOUT

An even more effective HIIT workout includes exercises that last longer than rest times. One standard format for this is Tabata, which often combines multiple movements over several rounds.

One Tabata round lasts for four minutes and consists of eight sets – each containing 20 seconds of hard exercise and 10 seconds of recovery.

Many trainers suggest doing four rounds in total, but if that is too difficult, start with two.

Begin with a five-minute warm-up. Then, perform one round of eight sets. During each set, do as many repetitions as possible.

After each round, take a one-minute rest and then do another round until, ideally, you’ve reached four. Finish with a 10-minute cool down. Getting the timing right can be hard, so consider using a workout app to signal each break.

Because HIIT is so intense, be sure to keep your number of weekly sessions to just one or two in the beginning, slowly increasing them to up to three times per week once your body is more accustomed to the work.

Always feel free to stop if you’re feeling lightheaded, dizzy or simply too out of breath to continue.

Here’s one version of Tabata-style HIIT that requires minimal equipment.

Before trying the workout, do an easy run-through of each move to ensure you are comfortable with it. If any move proves difficult because of a mobility issue, feel free to swap it out for a different one.

The goal is to get your heart rate up with these combination of exercises, so choose those that work for your body. As time goes by, swap in new exercises for variety.

Alyssa Rosenberg

THE WASHINGTON POST – “People love to tell expecting or new parents that their lives are going to be miserable,” Reason magazine senior editor Elizabeth Nolan Brown tweeted in March. A reckoning with the hardest parts of motherhood, she argued, has become a dire overcorrection. “Parenting needs better PR.”

Indeed it does. And when I asked, these 12 other parents were eager to share what they’d tell anyone considering having kids. Their families come in all sizes, and these moms and dads have a wide range of political perspectives. But they all agree that parenting is sublime – even, and maybe especially, when the job involves illness, loss or an out-of-the-blue creepy question about construction-site skeletons.

THE JOY OF SOCKS

The best and hardest things about parenting are, for me, the same: You care about your child’s happiness to an infinite degree. When they are down, or struggling, it can feel impossible to pull out of it.

But on the flip side, when something goes well – even something completely mundane – the joy is unparalleled. I remember vividly a time when I got an email with some extremely good professional news. I called my husband to tell him about it, and we agreed that in terms of daily happiness, it ranked second only to our daughter figuring out how to remove her own sock that morning. Parenting: when socks can bring joy. – Emily Oster, author of The Family Firm: A Data-Driven Guide to Better Decision Making in the Early School Years.

LIFESAVING BREAKFASTS

The best part of parenting is getting to be a kid again for them. Colouring, Play-Doh, hopscotch, Little League, bounce houses and playgrounds (and way better than the ones we had as kids).

Even relearning long division was interesting. Just don’t revisit your own youth so passionately that you tear a rotator cuff. The hardest part of parenting is that you have to be an adult for them. Boundaries, guidelines, the very long learning curve of teaching kids to behave in public without a screen? Yuck.

But being a mom got me through the hardest time in my life because they needed me, no matter how scared and sad I was. My husband died, and I had a toddler and a newborn.

For me, there has never been anything so simple and profound as getting out of bed every morning because my kids needed me to make them breakfast. – Mary Katharine Ham, host of the podcast Getting Hammered.

LITTLE HANDS AND BIG ONES

One of parenting’s first joys is the feeling of a little hand in your palm, that small gift representing a child’s trust and desire to learn from you in a world full of pointy edges.

These moments pass far too quickly as adolescence and young adulthood emerge – and these years usher in an independence that keeps their hands from reaching for yours.

But the time in between is precious. I taught my sons how to hold a football, throw a football and catch a football until they were far better at these things than I could ever be.

And while their little hands will never be in mine again, the high-fives that replaced them after winning games and the hugs that followed tough losses bring a new joy that befriends the wistful memories of the first one. – Theodore R Johnson, Post Opinions contributing columnist and senior adviser for New America’s US@250 initiative.

GEOGRAPHY LESSONS AND MORBID QUESTIONS

The best and also hardest parts of parenting all stem from the same thing: that you have literally created a new person, who is absolutely not you or your partner and has a completely different brain and different personality. My favourite moments are when my daughter surprises me by being a totally different person than me – when she turned out to be an amazing artist, or how she can actually read a map, unlike me – or when she pulls utterly original thoughts from her little goth head, such as asking construction workers if they’ve found any skeletons yet or telling me that at night the woods are full of, and I quote, “the floating dead.”

The hardest parts, though, are also when she’s being her own person – when she’s too scared to perform at a school talent show, too full of temper and prone to strongly held opinions and stormy outbursts. But I find that treating her, always, like a person I respect, and not just a little kid, has helped me balance out all the ways she delights me and all the ways she frustrates me. It helps me to see her not as a little doll but as a messy, cool, fun, amazing human whom I’m lucky enough to get to be best buddies with for a while before sending her off into the world. – Amber Noelle Sparks, author of And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges.

UNCONDITIONAL LOVE

When my mother died, I lost the only relationship whose foundation is unconditional love. Ten years later, I entered into another with the birth of my first child.

Most people go most of their lives in a parent-child relationship; either as a child or as a parent and often as both. I went 10 formative years without it, and it is irreplaceable; being without it is disorienting and isolating (especially without close relationships to grandparents or siblings, which I also didn’t have).

As wonderful as it is to be unconditionally loved as a child, it is that much better to love as the parent. It was so healing and fulfilling to have that relationship back when I had children, albeit on a different end of it (the better end, at that). And to have it six times over – it’s amazing how the heart can just grow. I feared when I was pregnant with my second that I would love my daughter less; but the love just multiplied. – Bethany S Mandel, editor of the Heroes of Liberty series.

THE END OF REGRET

I am someone prone to regret, second-guessing decisions I’ve made even far back in the past. Having kids did nothing less than end that forever for me.

Here’s why. All parents know that if things had been slightly different, even by a second, you would have ended up with slightly different kids. Different eggs, different sperm, a cosmic ray hits the initial DNA in a different place, etc. Any number of things change how your kids will turn out if you change a single variable. And because I can’t imagine wanting them to be anyone other than who they are, it resolved my regret and second-guessing. I can’t look back anymore and regret things, because if anything had been even the slightest bit different, I wouldn’t have these two wonderful boys precisely the way they are. – Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.

MIDNIGHT DANCE PARTIES

I looked at the baby monitor in relief. The crying had finally stopped. Maybe this sleep-training stuff was working after all. Then I noticed something odd – flashing lights in her room. I tiptoed in to find my child wasn’t asleep at all.

She had scooted to one end of her crib, put a hand through the vertical slats and somehow managed to reach the Hatch night light on a nearby stool. She figured out that if she tapped the top of it, the light would change colours and play different sounds and lullabies.

She was basically throwing her own disco party – at six months old. She looked over and beamed at me. I was exhausted. It was well past her bedtime, but I found myself throwing up my arms and trying a few gangly dance moves. This is parenting: the midnight dance party you didn’t want but somehow needed. – Heather Long, Post Opinions columnist.

NEW WONDERS AND TINY WOES

I had my daughter in April 2020, at the start of the pandemic. It’s not an exaggeration to say she got me through those early difficult days. Coming home from a challenging day at work, there was always this happy, sweet and cherubic baby who couldn’t get enough of kisses, cuddles and bedtime stories. (Unfortunately, the terrible twos set in when she became a toddler, but that’s another story).

Another amazing part of being a parent is watching the joy in my children’s eyes as they have a new experience or go through an “aha” moment. There are so many of these, even in a single day. We adults would do well to seek new wonders like these, too.

My kids are at the age now (three and five) where it’s a Hallmark moment one minute, where they’re playing together and saying how much they love each other, and then there’s crying, toys being thrown, and accusations of the other sibling “being mean!” or “being a poopyhead!”- Leana S Wen, Post Opinions columnist.

UNEXPECTED WARMTH AND WISDOM

I once woke up on the sofa after taking care of a sick seven-year-old all night. It was 5am, and my three-year-old was holding my hand and kissing each fingertip one at a time. I asked her why she was up so early, and she said, “I couldn’t sleep because I just needed to love my mommy.”

And she crawled into my arms. I was so tired, and she was so beautiful. That moment remains the perfect example of what parenting has been for me these past 16 years. – Hannah Grieco, editor of And If That Mockingbird Don’t Sing: Parenting Stories Gone Speculative.