Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock recently, you have probably heard about the never ending battle between High Intensity Interval Training and regular cardio. Although I am not going to present a strong opinion in favor of any of them, I would like to take some time to tell you what HIIT is and how it can help you shed fat.

As the name itself suggests, High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is a very tough, extremely intensive, but also relatively short work out. HIIT excercises don’t usually last longer than 15 to 25 minutes total, so this particular type of workout is perfect if you’re short on time.

The way HIIT workout is structured is you start with 3-5 minutes of low intensity to warm up. The next portion is divided into alternating 10-30 second segments of very intensive all out pace and around 60 seconds of a low intensity recovery period. So, just to give you an example, if you’re doing HIIT on a bike, you’re going to ride as fast as you can for 10-30 seconds (if you can go longer than that, you’re not going all out) and then you’re going to go slower for another minute or so. Then, when that second minute is over, you go back to going all out again. You will repeat this 5-8 times and then do a slow cooldown fo 3-5 minutes.

As you can probably imagine, this type of weightloss workout is extremely effective as it burns a lot of those unwanted calories. The best thing about it is that it works very effectively even after you work out as your metabolic rate remains raised for a long time after you’re finished excercising.

On the other hand, it’s important for you to know and realize that your body adapts to everything so you really should have variety if you’re really thinking about being successfull. I mean, what I am trying to say is that if you do something, no matter what it is for an extended period of time, the results you’ll get are going to decrease. That’s obvious perhaps, but I wanted to make sure that you understand it well.

For that reason you should make sure that you don’t stick only to HIIT, but you do regular cardio as well whenever you have enough time to do it (I am sure that you remember that cardio workouts can be quite long. They can last as long as 45 minutes which you may not always have.)

The one last thing I wanted to say about HIIT and fat loss is that it’s not good for everyone. As you probably noticed, it requires some highly intensive workout and if your body is not used to it, maybe you should spend some time preparing it for it before you dive headfirst into HIIT. I am sure you don’t want to overdo it and have to take breaks from excercising all together, right?

Both regular cardio and HIIT are great. The one thing you have to know about is that whether you decide to do HIIT or cardio, you really shouldn’t go overboard with it. Just listen to what your body tells you and give it variety it needs.