The world of fitness - like pretty much every other industry - goes through fads and phases of what's popular. 1980's step classes, early 90's hip-hop dance, late 90's fitness boxing, early 2000's South American dance fusion, mid-2000's kettlebells and bootcamps...

Interval training has taken off in recent years. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) has been around for ages and is a great way of increasing your fitness as it gets you to push yourself to your limits which has been shown to be one of the most effective ways to challenge your body.

The gist of it is that you have a work period where you do a given exercise, followed by a rest period where you have time to recover and prepare for the next round.

You can also do interval training where you put exercises back to back, for example, one interval of a fast-paced cardio move followed by another interval of simply holding a stretch or performing a slower-paced strength training exercise.

Like intervals but don't want high intensity?

Interval training doesn't need to be high intensity! Intervals can cater to people of different fitness abilities or even just different energy levels which means that everyone gets a decent training session. One person may manage 10 reps of an exercise in the same time that someone else may do 20 reps.

To mix things up, you can change your work and rest intervals. For example, you might do five different exercises for 50 seconds of work, 10 seconds of rest. Or do the same exercise for 10 rounds of 2 minutes work, 20 seconds rest.

You can apply this style of training to anything; boxing, weight training, calisthenics, running. Use it to vary your workouts but be aware, if you train in this style frequently all the time you may end up feeling burned out after a few weeks or months if you lead a high stress lifestyle. If that sounds like you, it's a good idea to balance HIIT out with other styles of training.

References

Gaz, V.D. (2017, October 27), Why interval training may be the best workout at any age. Retrieved from https://www.mayoclinic.org/why-interval-training-may-be-the-best-workout-at-any-age/art-20342125

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