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3 Killer HIIT Training Workouts

In this post, we’ve shared 3 killer hiit training workouts. Read on to learn more.

Since the American College of Sports Medicine declared by a survey of its professional membership that high-intensity interval training was the most popular fitness trend in 2014, these workouts have changed the shape of everyday exercise routines for office workers and professional athletes alike.

High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is an effective and convenient type of exercise program that uses short bursts of strenuous physical exertion punctuated by brief recovery periods to force the body into repeated instances of anaerobic activity within a very short time period.

Versatility is perhaps its most attractive trait, but HIIT is not just another class of exercise. Instead, it offers the world of fitness a unique and efficient approach to designing your workout routine. If you are interested in this 2014 fitness darling turned professional staple and how it can improve your life, then keep reading for a high-intensity crash course on HIIT workouts!

Table of Contents

Can I Do HIIT Training at Home?

One of the many reasons that make high-intensity interval training so popular is precisely the ability to implement it from home! HIIT workouts can incorporate most kinds of exercise activities and equipment and are only limited to including exercises that can be done in short bursts of time. Some possible activities and equipment you can use in your HIIT routine can be:

  • Running sprints
  • Swimming sprints
  • Bicycling
  • Jump rope
  • Light hand weights
  • Bodyweight exercises (e.g. pushups, situps, squats, jumping jacks, etc.)
  • Dancing

Under no circumstances should any reader feel the need to fuse every single one of the above-suggested activities into a single HIIT workout routine. In fact, severe exhaustion and even injury could result from overambitious exercise plans attempting to use the high-intensity interval training approach.

Since HIIT routines rely on short bursts of activity, they can be implemented anywhere you have enough space to perform your exercises of choice. You can use high-intensity interval training at home, during your breaks at work or school, or even incorporate it into your commute if you travel at least partially by foot or bicycle!

Is 20 Minutes of HIIT Enough?

Since the focus of high-intensity interval training is on the interchange of brief exercises with often briefer rest periods, this method is great for designing workouts that are short without compromising effectiveness. HIIT workout routines can be as short as four minutes and as long as twenty, but it is recommended to keep them shorter than thirty minutes to avoid overdoing it.

3 Killer HIIT Training Workouts

Whether you are an exercise novice, a fitness enthusiast, or just a desk jockey looking for a healthy way to shake up your daily physical routines, one of these three killer high-intensity interval training workouts is sure to push your body to stretch its endurance limits!

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Beginner HIIT Workout

One of the most common forms of high-intensity interval training is the Tabata regimen. Based on a 1996 study in Japan, the approach used by the lead scientist Dr. Izumi Tabata to design the HIIT workout routines implemented for the experiment is arguably one of the most influential to date. It is also the best HIIT routine to start with because each set is only four minutes!

While Tabata credits Japan’s Olympic speed skating coach Irisawa Koichi for the approach used by his study, the following program is designed for beginners:

  • Phase 0 (10 minutes): Warm up with a little cardio, like a brief jog or some jump rope, and then be sure to stretch your legs thoroughly.
  • Phase 1 (20 seconds): Perform squats to the fullest of your ability for the full twenty seconds. Be sure to focus on maintaining your form rather than on completing a high number of squats.
  • Phase 2 (10 seconds): Rest completely. Remember to drink some water!
  • Phase 3 (2 minutes and 30 seconds): After resting for 10 seconds, return immediately to performing squats for twenty straight seconds. Repeat Phases 1 and 2 at least 6 times, or until exhaustion. Consider increasing the difficulty after you can perform 9 sets with relative ease.

This beginner’s exercise program focuses on the leg muscles because they tend to have the highest natural endurance, making it an easy place to start. However, newcomers to the high-intensity interval training approach should remain cautious and utilize this workout program no more than two days a week in addition to other light and moderate exercises.

You can insert one or more kinds of exercises into a Tabata workout using this formula, as long as they can accommodate the time-sensitive nature of the program. This means that you need to be able to start, stop, and alternate between exercises quickly. Simple bodyweight exercises, such as burpees or sprints, are best suited to beginner Tagata-style HIIT exercise programs.

Intermediate HIIT Workout

Once you have become accustomed to the hard and fast approach of the Tagata routine, you might find yourself tempted to extend the duration of your sets. This is acceptable so long as the total of all your sets does not exceed thirty minutes in duration. After this, you place yourself at serious risk for injury and overexertion.

The two most common ways to expand on the structure of the previous routine are to increase exercise variety and to increase phase duration. Increasing exercise variety usually means picking a different exercise for every phase, while increasing phase duration simply means extending the amount of time you spend exercising or resting.

Once your beginner’s routine becomes too easy for you, try this one:

  • Phase 0 (10-15 minutes): Warm up with some cardio, like a brief jog or some jump rope, and then be sure to stretch thoroughly.
  • Phase 1 (25 seconds): Perform squats to the fullest of your ability for the full duration. Be sure to focus on maintaining your form, rather than on completing a high number of squats.
  • Phase 2 (15 seconds): Rest completely. Remember to drink some water!
  • Phase 3 (40 seconds): After resting, return immediately to exercising, repeating Phases 1 and 2 but this time performing push-ups instead of squats.
  • Phase 4 (2 minutes and 40 seconds): Repeat Phases 1 and 2 six more times, each time selecting a different exercise from the following list: sit-ups, wall sits, pull-ups, high knees, candlestick curls, and leg lifts.

Either of these expansion methods can help you take your killer HIIT workout to the next level. As this routine gets easier, you can increase the duration of your active phases by increasing the distance of your sprints. You could also consider selecting exercises that focus on specific muscle groups and challenge yourself to strengthen specific areas of your body.

Advanced HIIT Workout

After you’ve stretched your workout routine over every goalpost of difficulty progression and found yourself up against the safety limitations of high-intensity interval training, you will be glad to know that the versatility of this impactful approach to physical fitness has yet to fail you. In fact, there is still plenty of ‘up’ from here!

This is due to the final flexibility of high-intensity training regiments: their modularity. By cycling through several exercises in quick succession, you can turn an entire five-minute session into its own set! Rather than increasing the duration of your phases, simply introduce even more variety to your exercise routine and repeat it over again.

Once at the advanced level, it is extremely important to balance the increases in difficulty across each category fairly evenly. The most intensive HIIT workout that the average person can accomplish without risking over-exhaustion or strain will look something like this:

  • Phase 0 (10-20 minutes): Warm up with some cardio, like a moderate jog or some jump rope, and then be sure to stretch thoroughly.
  • Phase 1 (5 minutes): Alternate between performing squats to the fullest of your ability for 30 seconds and resting for 20 seconds. Repeat this alternation six times.
  • Phase 2 (5 minutes): Alternate between performing push-ups to the fullest of your ability for 30 seconds and resting for 20 seconds. Repeat this alternation six times.
  • Phase 3 (5 minutes): Alternate between performing crunches to the fullest of your ability for 30 seconds and resting for 20 seconds. Repeat this alternation six times.
  • Phase 4 (5 minutes): Alternate between performing high knees to the fullest of your ability for 30 seconds and resting for 20 seconds. Repeat this alternation six times.
  • Phase 5 (5 minutes): Alternate between performing burpees to the fullest of your ability for 30 seconds and resting for 20 seconds. Repeat this alternation six times.

Despite this routine being labeled as advanced, its use should still be limited to only two days a week. If you would like to increase the difficulty of your routine even further, consider including exercises with hand weights or supplementing your current exercise with additional weight by wearing weighted harnesses or bodyweights.

Is HIIT Good for Losing Belly Fat?

High-intensity interval training regimens are fantastic workout routines for burning off belly fat. This is because HIIT routines push the body into a fierce exertion that uses up more energy than the body can afford to spend metabolizing. This forces the body to burn fat for energy instead, using metabolic processes which do not require oxygen or external energy input.

If one hopes to use a HIIT workout routine to shave off belly fat in specific, however, the exercises chosen to be in the regimen should still address the abdominal muscle groups. It is also important for the routine to remain balanced so that overexertion can be avoided, as well as for you to incorporate varied activities across your entire fitness scheme to prevent injury.

A successful HIIT workout routine has many more benefits than just burning fat for a bikini belly. Some positive health effects observed to be related to the use of high-intensity interval training routines include, but are not limited to:

  • Increased metabolism: After a HIIT workout routine, your body will continue to burn energy at a faster rate than it did before the routine. This means that your body will keep using the fat-burning metabolic pathways jump-started by a high-intensity interval training session, even after you finish your workout!
  • Increased oxygen intake: Adherents to the high-intensity interval training approach will find that their workouts greatly influence their average maximum lung capacity. This means that not only will you breathe better in general, but you will also have an easier time getting enough air while working out!
  • Increased metabolic efficiency: High-intensity interval training routines force your body to burn fat, which creates an amount of metabolic waste that it does not normally need to deal with. This means that as you progress toward your HIIT fitness goals, your body will become more efficient at processing and disposing of metabolic wastes.

As a result, overdoing it will naturally wear out your body more quickly than you may expect. Your muscles may build up tiny tears and micro-strains faster than your body can repair them if you push yourself too hard, as well as over-encumber your body with more metabolic waste than it can process and excrete.

How Many Times a Week Should You Do a HIIT Workout?

Generally speaking, the average person should allow for at least two full days of rest between days on which they practice a high-intensity interval training program. This is to give the body time to recuperate by repairing muscle and restoring all the energy unexpectedly lost to vigorous physical activity.

This amounts to using a HIIT workout routine an average of only two days every week. However, this does not necessarily mean that a fitness plan is barred from including other workout routines on other days of the week. The American Council on Exercise instead suggests that other exercises use different muscle groups than those targeted by a HIIT routine.

If you are focused solely on strength or endurance training, or even if you are just strapped for time, then a HIIT-based fitness program designed for half-hour sessions twice a week may be enough rigorous physical activity for you to reach your fitness goals without too much extra scheduling.

However, it is still encouraged that milder forms of exercise be pursued in addition to dedicated weight loss or strength training programs. This is so that your body will get to experience a greater range of motion than what is required of a typical high-intensity interval training regimen, which is important for other areas of health and fitness like joint health and coordination skills.

Outro

High-intensity interval training has been experimented with and used by professional athletes for much longer than mainstream fitness gurus, but its popularity has yet to wane since the introduction of HIIT workout routines to the world of hometown gyms almost a decade ago. And for good reason: this method of designing workout routines is flexible and effective, accessible to exercise enthusiasts, and practical for sportsmen.

A typical HIIT routine can be done at home in twenty minutes or less, twice a week for a plethora of health benefits ranging from burning belly fat to increasing lung capacity to facilitating higher metabolic capacity. These killer HIIT training workouts can also be adapted to nearly every location, time limitation, and equipment availability, which makes them perfect for mindful individuals in need of a workout routine that can fit into their already busy schedules!