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The no-pain, no-gain philosophy of exercise has always been embraced by the few, not the masses.
In the early days, HIIT was considered best suited to athletes and the fittest, but it wasn’t long before fitness experts suggested it could prove valuable to the average athlete. Photo by PORNCHAI SODA /Getty Images/iStockphoto
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High-intensity interval training (HIIT) topped the American College of Sports Medicine’s annual Global Fitness Trends Survey for the first time in 2014 and has since remained among the top 10 It’s a favorite in the fitness world, and it seems there’s little HIIT can’t do.
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Characterized by short bursts of high-intensity exercise (between one and four minutes) followed by short periods of rest, HIIT’s popularity lies largely in its ability to deliver big results in a short amount of time. The health and fitness benefits have been shown to be similar or better than those of moderate-intensity workouts that take twice as long.
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It’s not just the gym crowd that’s been clamoring for HIIT. The research community has brought the young, the old, the fit, the unfit and everyone in between into the lab to see if the magic of HIIT is universal. In general, it is. Most of the populations studied have benefited from significant gains in health and fitness. But what is still up for debate is whether athletes find high-energy workouts more enjoyable than moderate-intensity, steady-state exercises.
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Panteleimon Ekkekakis, professor and chair of the kinesiology department at Michigan State University, has spent most of his career studying how different intensities of exercise make people feel. He’s been following the HIIT trend since news of its benefits began circulating among exercise physiologists in the early 2000s.
“HIIT started gaining traction at an amazing rate and became this major global phenomenon,” said Ekkekakis, who says there are roughly 700 studies published a year on HIIT.
In the early days, HIIT was considered best suited to athletes and the fittest, but it wasn’t long before fitness experts were suggesting it could prove valuable to the average Joe and Jill. Exercise psychologists like Ekkekakis were skeptical.
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“It will never work, because we all know that high-intensity exercise is unpleasant,” he said.
To get the insane benefits of HIIT workouts, you need to train at 85 to 95 percent of your maximum effort (max heart rate), which isn’t for everyone. The no-pain, no-gain philosophy of exercise has always been embraced by the few, not the masses. Despite this, researchers began to publish data suggesting that not only is HIIT well tolerated by average athletes, but they actually find it more enjoyable than less intense workouts.
The combination of enjoyment with the promise of significant results in less time is the holy grail in terms of exercise adherence. Lack of time has been cited as one of the main reasons why few people exercise regularly.
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Still, Ekkekakis wasn’t buying it.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that,” he said of why the dropout rate is so high. “Most people have discretionary time; they simply choose not to allocate that discretionary time to exercise, presumably because they find other things that make them feel better or give them more satisfaction.”
Citing a preponderance of evidence showing that intensity turns people off, Ekkekakis decided to take a closer look at HIIT’s track record for long-term adherence. The results were published in a recent issue of Sport and Exercise Psychology. Together with colleague Stuart Biddle of the University of Southern Queensland, Australia, Ekkekakis identified eight high-quality studies comparing HIIT with moderate-intensity exercise, all of which included follow-ups of at least 12 months. What they found is unlikely to make HIIT fans happy.
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“While nonadherence and dropout are major challenges for any form of exercise, especially in unsupervised settings, these issues were shown to be exacerbated with HIIT,” Ekkekakis and Biddle stated in the study. “Compared to moderate-intensity exercise, more people assigned to HIIT did not meet their prescription when unsupervised, likely because they could not.”
Not all subjects in the study gave up exercise entirely; some were not as motivated to maintain the same intensity on their own as when they were under the watchful eye of an instructor. They took the workouts down a notch or two to a more comfortable, moderate-intensity range. That’s not a bad thing, it’s just that when combined with the short duration of most prescribed HIIT workouts, the health and fitness benefits are likely to be less significant than advertised.
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So where did the idea come from that athletes preferred HIIT over less intense workouts if all eight studies showed that most people eventually gave up on HIIT?
It turns out that measuring exercise enjoyment is harder than you might think. People are not in a position to answer questions about how they feel in the middle of a hard workout. Any questions must wait until the training is over. With all the hard work done and most people feeling accomplished from their efforts, their feelings are very different than when they were in full sweat mode.
“After exercise, almost everyone feels good,” agreed Ekkekakis. “But they might feel good because the damn thing is done.”
Does this mean HIIT has been oversold as a solution to sedentary habits? Probably. But that doesn’t make it a bad choice. It’s not for everyone, which puts it on par with most other workouts. The measure of effective training is not how successful it is in a lab, but whether you want to do it again on your own.
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