Lack of Time is No Longer an Excuse

It’s the most common reason out there to avoid going to the gym – long hours at work, helping the kids with homework, making dinner and doing dishes all leave you with, “not enough time to exercise.”  Well guess what, some of the fittest people in the world do those very same things but still manage to do something to make themselves healthier every day.  Their days are the very same twenty four hours that yours are, so where do they find the 45 minutes to an hour a day three or four days a week to keep their weight down and their bodies healthy? 

Traditional long, slow distance cardio has it’s place if you are an endurance athlete who is training for a half marathon, a full marathon or a fifty mile bike race, but if you are just in the market to melt away excess body fat and get in the best shape of your life there are better and faster methods out there.

High intensity interval training, or HIIT, allows you to reap the very same benefits (possibly even greater benefits) as the more common LSD type of cardio in far less time.  In original studies to prove HIIT’s effectiveness subjects were to perform a given cardio movement (stationary bike, running, stair climber, etc.) at an all out pace for one minute followed by a short rest period.  The pattern was continued in this fashion (short burst of all out exercise followed by short rest period) for up to ten sets for a total of approximately twenty minutes of exercise including rest.

The results proved to be astounding, but the fact that the exercise was being performed “all out” seemed to frighten some people.  Despite the fact that the bursts of exercise are only performed in one minute sessions, the maximum effort was deemed to be a bit too extreme for those who were exceedingly out of shape or of advanced age.  Thankfully, researchers from McMaster University in Canada have done further research on HIIT training and the results of a new study reveal that the exercise doesn’t necessarily need to be performed at a maximal effort in order to reap the benefits.

Subjects of the study still performed at a high level of effort, often in excess of 90% of the maximum heart rate, but that is still quite a bit below what would be considered a maximum effort (according to the study that is only approximately 50% of what can be achieved by a person performing an all out sprint).  So you can still get the powerful results to help you achieve your health and fitness goals in a fraction of the time it would have taken you with more tradition cardio training, but you don’t need to be worried about the potential dangers that people associate with exercising at an all out maximum effort.

So what does this mean for the average exerciser – it means that you can get all of the benefits of traditional cardio, which would have taken you several hours a week, in just three twenty minute sessions per week.  If your primary excuse for not being able to get in shape was a lack of time – it’s time to kiss it goodbye and start getting fit with some high intensity intervals.