 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coyke. Today, I want to talk about the benefits of high-intensity interval training. So, first and foremost, HIIT, HIT, as we call it, is really time-efficient and that's probably the biggest benefit of this. So, for those that don't know, high-intensity interval training is me taking two different periods of time, one considered my work period and one considered my rest period. And so, I can do a, you know, 30 second of work interval where I'm trying at a, you know, really hard. That's high-intensity. I am, you know, I'm fatiguing, I couldn't really go for much longer than 30 seconds, and then I stop. And then I take my rest interval, my 30 seconds in this case, and I rest for 30 seconds, you know, totally inactive. The, the, if I do this, during that 30 seconds of work, I accumulate a lot of fatigue, a lot of, like, metabolic byproducts inside my muscle and my body has to find a way to do something about them because I've only got 30 seconds of rest and then this next work period is gonna come back up, right? So, I need to be able to maintain my function and as I push myself through these, these longer and longer, high-intensity interval workouts, I push my body to figure out how to recover from them so that I can do more work in the same amount of time. Okay, so it's nice because it's, it's generally really simple. It, or it can be really simple. I push, you know, I could just hop on a bike and I sprint for 30 seconds, and then I rest for 30, and then I sprint for 30 seconds, and then I rest for 30, and I repeat that for a given number of intervals. Now, what's nice about that is I build up, as I said, these byproducts, but the workout kind of extends itself even once it's done because I have to recover from it. I talked in a previous video about the high-intensity interval training and what it looks like, right? So I have this peak of hardness, difficulty, and then I have this dip of recovery, and that repeats over and over. My heart rate climbs and climbs and climbs until it hits about a peak and then it might maintain that peak. We say maybe it's a plateau, is a better descriptor of it, and then I stop and it starts to climb back down. So my heart rate will, will drop pretty quickly, but my oxygen consumption will stay elevated because I have all these byproducts still laying around. I need to re-establish some semblance of equilibrium, some semblance of rest within my cells, within my body. Okay, so if I do high-intensity interval training for 30 minutes, then, you know, for the next 20 or so, my, my oxygen consumption is still elevated. It's still kind of like I'm working out. It's like I'm doing an aerobic workout while I, you know, dry off and change and shower or whatever. So what happens is I can put my workout in a 30-minute chunk or maybe even shorter than that, 15 minutes or five minutes or something like that. And then it's kind of like I'm working out for a little bit longer than that. And so it's really time-efficient, right? I still need to, you know, it's still hard and I still sweat. I still need to clean myself up afterwards. But I don't have to work for as long because my work was so intense. Okay, I spent a little bit more repetitive time on that because that is the major benefit of doing this. Second biggest thing is it's got to stress your muscle a little bit more. So if I just go for a jog, I might, you know, it's not as time-efficient, right? It's going to extend out a little bit longer. But, you know, the other part of that is it's not stressing my muscle really that much. Some people will think I'm crazy, but if you haven't done high-intensity interval training, it's totally different on the muscle. Your muscle will not be able to contract anymore. It's just, it's a physiological property of fatigue. So when I do a high and highly intense thing, that is kind of the thing that qualifies it as a high-intensity interval. This fatigue accumulates and as I push through that, my muscle fatigues a lot. And so what's good about that is it signals my body to keep that muscle because I'm using it, right? So when I do high-intensity interval training, I get a signal to keep muscle around, which when I just go for a long, slower run, I don't get that signal. And if your goals are body composition related, then you're not going to get the same lean tone muscular look from just running as you would get from something like high-intensity interval training. Now, third up, not really a benefit to everyone, but it looks super hardcore and it looks like you're trying really hard. And if you're around people who are watching you do this, they think you're really serious about your exercise. It's not just about aesthetics. It's also about being the type of person who tries hard during your exercise, right? Those people are going to see more progress because they are pushing their bodies a lot more. OK, again, it's not just a vanity thing. It's about becoming the person you want to be. And then fourth is it's a little bit more whole body. It's easier to stress every muscle in the body. So if I go for a run, I use a lot of my muscle, but primarily I'm going to feel this in my legs. I'm not really stressing my upper body quite as much. Whereas if I do a high-intensity interval workout, I need to, if it's on like an aerodyne bike, I need total coordination of the upper and lower body. At the same time, I got my arms punching while my legs are pushing down. And it's just like maximal rhythmic contractions of every muscle in your body, right? That can kind of stress everything. You might even be sore in your upper body after an aerodyne sprint workout, high-intensity interval workout. The other way that high-intensity interval training is usually done is in a circuit fashion. So you might do squats in one exercise and then push-ups in the next exercise and then rows in the next exercise and then a bike sprint in the next exercise. And doing that, you put stress on all these different muscles. And what's also nice about that is when I do my squats, it really stresses my legs. But then when I go do my push-ups, my legs kind of get to rest. And so I can keep my output really high. And I can extend that added oxygen consumption that we were talking about earlier. After the exercise, that EPOC epoch, whatever it's called, afterwards. So I have this added element of energy output or burn that's going on. This after burn is actually a term that was used for it. So those are the big benefits of high-intensity interval training. It's really time-efficient. It stresses your muscle. It looks cool and you become a person who tries really hard during your exercise. And you get to stress the whole body kind of evenly. Tomorrow, we're going to talk about some of the drawbacks to high-intensity interval training.