Today was supposed to be Leg Day, but instead I got HIIT.
HIIT isn’t a typo, though there is still a grammatical error we’re just going to chalk up to style. It’s a workout, or I suppose style of workout that is geared for improving your fitness, whether a specific area or overall, by pushing your limits. By style of workout, I mean it’s kind of like a workout philosophy. Like how cardio can be running, biking, or swimming. Or how strength training could be weights, resistance, or fighting the urge to open another tab from that… site. HIIT, too, can be a variety of workouts, but they all share the same basic idea.
High Intensity Interval Training, aka HIIT, gained popularity years and years ago, and I’m pretty sure it’s become standard exercise cannon these days. Most people that I know that have at all explored exercise past their high school gym class know it, and I’d bet there are schools that teach it now, too. I think I talked about doing HIIT years ago, back when this blog was very different. In my late 20s and early 30s (I’m in my 40 now), I had great success when I employed HIIT workouts. I might guess they were the most successful parts of all my cross training efforts, and I would suspect I could make progress again if I just focused on the HIIT style. I base this in part on a friend that states he just does HIIT (burpees I think), and he has looked amazing ever since.
I’ll give a brief explanation for what HIIT is, though if you’re really interested, you should probably find a legit fitness source. I seem to remember the Mayo Clinic having a great write-up in the mid 2010s, but I can’t be bothered to google that for a link right now.
The first aspect of all HIIT style workouts is right in the title, that they are high intensity – meaning you do the workouts with a ferocity, a level of exertion greater than your normal workout. So if you go for a jog and want to increase your fitness level, then sometimes your jog should be a run. But it’s not high intensity until you bump it all the way up to a sprint. Imagine you can mentally gauge your workout intensity and know what your effort level is at each workout. Let’s call a light walk something like a 10-15%, a jog or light run between 20-50%, and at 100% you’re in a dead-ass-leave-nothing-behind sprint.
The “interval” half is just as important, because if you just go from zero to 100%, ignoring the obvious invitation to injury, then you probably aren’t going to sustain the workout for very long. And that’s kind of important, so you break the workout into sections of “on” and “off”, where each section of “on” is where you go hard and “off” is where you don’t. The lack of quantifiable specificity in that last statement is key, as different styles and techniques place the intensity and interval spacing in each section at different levels, often within the same workout.
For a single-exercise routine like HIIT Burpees, you might do something like 45 seconds “on”, where you just do as many Burpees at as hard an intensity as you can muster followed by 15 seconds “off”, where you just rest. That rest might not be entirely literal, but maybe you grab a swig of water, shake the legs out, swing your arms a little… you know, whatever you do to reset as best as you can before the next round. Because the next round is coming, immediately.
If you’re doing my favorite version of HIIT interval sprinting, or “Wind Sprints” as I called them back in my military days, you might do a hard-as-possible sprint for 20 seconds or 100 yards, and then fall into a light jog for 20 seconds. In Wind Sprints, you never stop, you just slow down to a sustainable pace. In either case, after the “off” section, that next round I warned you about comes for you. You’ll repeat cycles of “on” and “off” sections until its over. You know, intervals, just like the label on the tin reads.
This past Saturday I did a version of HIIT sprints to help work on my running goal, though not nearly as intense as the Wind Sprints of my younger years. Instead, I just used the open basketball court at the school across the street to run sprints, then actually stopping to rest in between charges. Not long rests, which would negate the benefits of the “interval” part of the training, though admittedly not as short as would give the best boost. I think for this type of sprint training, the recommended rest period is mercilessly short, like 10 seconds or something. Woof. No, this was more like 30 second rests. And not actual Wind Sprints, which is something I’d love to do again, but to do them right, I’d need a group of at least five people. Five might be too few, come to think of it. But whatever, I’m not doing them anytime soon. Should I explain how to do those? Another time, perhaps.
Today, which is Wednesday, I had plans to do just a normal walk and some weightlifting. Today is supposed to be leg day. However, it’s raining outside, which doesn’t usually stop me from my walk. But yeah, I just wasn’t feelin’ it. And I’ve been telling myself that I would cross train with my indoor bike and some HIIT stuff, and that would leave me plenty of time to do my legs, right? So cue today’s workout, in which I followed two routines. This time I can easily share them, because they were from some youtube folks:
GCN – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aI_nSzypjO4
Emi Wong – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bleOTMDa3_4
I can’t vouch for either of these instructors’ other works or as people in general, and I’m not going to bother finding out if I can. I’m just interested in these specific workouts, and I’m happy to recommend them for folks like me whom are just getting back into the swing of things. For my use, I did the two back-to-back, starting with the spinning (which is how cycle-douches refer to stationary bike sessions).
For the cycling session, I don’t think I can honestly say I went at full intensity. I was a little worried about injuring myself, so I definitely held a bit back. On the last leg, however, I did try to cash in as much as I could, and that left me pretty close to spent. The second workout was a calisthenics routine, which I was likewise planning to hold back on. It’s my reintroduction, so I should ease into things, right. Yeah, well, ain’t nothin’ in this workout an “ease” when you’re old and busted. I found some of the exercises in this routine so hard that there wasn’t any slack to hold back on. To the point, I had previously thought that when I got back to HIIT, I’d keep it simple like my friend did, and just do all-burpee sessions. How foolish. The penultimate exercise in this video, what the presenter Emi called a “Walking Burpee”, is supposed to be an easier version of the standard. And I bet she’s correct in that assertion. But they were definitely not easy for me!
I was already beat from the exercises that preceded it, and just in the act of trying to hand-walk into the down position of my very first rep, I was ready to give up.
Doing burpees is one of those exercises that is infamous amongst workout…ers, I guess I’ll call them, whatever, I’ve clearly lost my mind. People find them hard to do. Even people that work out regularly, including those that are considered quite fit, find burpees hard to do. Perhaps because they are hard to do. Everyone I know who’s ever played intense sports or been in the military knows them well, and they all agree that doing burpees sucks.
I’m going to share a link to someone explaining burpees in a second. This is for those of you who have yet to have the pleasure, so you can get an idea of just what they are. It is also for the rest of us that may know them by other names or with slightly different techniques. In case you don’t know, there are a lot of different types of burpess, which may omit a step, add something extra, or mix it up some other way. Sometimes the differences seem regional, like everyone from this area does the jump and everyone from that area doesn’t. I sometimes omit the jump because I live on the second floor, but when that isn’t a problem I tend to include it. It’s how we did it in TACP. Also fitness couches will sometimes modify the technique for specific needs and targets, like there’s a version with an extra “frog hop” that I’ve heard gets used for people on the defensive line in football, so they get an edge on that explosive first burst off the line.
This is the one I’m most familiar with – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JZQA08SlJnM. If you’ve never done them before, I encourage you to give them a try. But anything you have planned for the day done first.
Fucking ridiculous. How could I have even entertained the idea of doing a full HIIT Burpee-only routine? What was I going to do, one of them? The instant I got into the down position on the first one I knew I was wrong. Remind you, this isn’t even a fullass real burpee, it’s a modified easier style. In the 45 second window she gave to perform them, I got in like five. If good form counts, then zero, actually. I did zero, and it still beat my ass like a drum. I was dripping with sweat and shaking before the 10 second mark. I had to drag myself into the last exercise, and I definitely did not finish strong.
If you are already fit, I bet neither of the routines I linked would be much of a challenge. But for where I’m at right now, they were both pretty damned intense, especially back to back. They were exactly the beatdown I’ve been looking for. Highly recommend.
If the rain lets up a little, I’ll probably still try and get a walk in. A nice walk always feel good and sets me right. But Leg Day is fucking canceled.