HIIT or MISS? Should you be doing some form of interval training?

High intensity interval training or HIIT has taken a bit of stick recently. Mainly from people who it is the wrong training method for. Let's look into if and why intervals could be for you.

This style of training involves bursts of high intensity, explosive and near maximal exercise followed by short rest periods for repeated bouts.

HIIT training has low barriers to entry as your bodyweight is usually enough to perform the exercises. This allows many people who are beginning their fitness journey with a HIIT session. This has led to a HIIT getting a bit of a bad rap. It is tough. You will get hot, go red and sweaty. This is uncomfortable, especially for those just starting out on their fitness journey.

Also, if your goal is an aesthetic one, such as lean muscle growth, resistance training is the method for you.

However, there are a population of people that should absolutely have some form of interval training in their training programme. If your goal is performance, maybe you play an intermittent team sport such as football or rugby, maybe you're performing in a sport with a large anaerobic component such as boxing or are an endurance athlete looking to push back the point at which you begin to fatigue. For these people interval training will play a vital role in training, and it won't involve jumping around their living room on a yoga mat. Intervals can and should involve sprints, resisted sprints, hill sprints, weighted exercises, Olympic lifts and much more.

Your training should be specific and HIIT is easily adapted to be sport specific. The adaptations from a well-executed interval training programme, such as improved anaerobic threshold, increased peak power, increased anaerobic enzymes to name a few will be extremely beneficial to performance allowing making you a harder, better, faster athlete.