Harvieu25

I keep reading intervals make you faster overall, with a faster, easier, lower heart rate while pushing a bigger gear average speed. How does this work? If you would give other examples as well of "how this helps that".

Thanks.

wolfchild

Here are some benefits of HIIT workouts:

-loosing fat while preserving and building lean muscle
-improves both aerobic and anaerobic performance
-strengthens your cardiovascular system
-develops sport-specific energy systems
-develops work capacity, ability to tolerate high intensity for longer periods of time
-improves fat and carb metabolism
-targets your fast-twitch muscle fibres
-improves your VO2max
-keeps your metabolism fired up for many hours after your workout

chasm54

Table 1 in this article explains the different traing zones, and Table 2 the physiological adaptations produced by them.

Looigi

The simplest explanation is that interval training stresses the body, and the body adapts to the stress. Interval training interleaves periods of high stress with short periods of rest. The rest periods allow you to attain and maintain higher stress levels during high stress periods. The higher stress level leads to faster adaptation.

Carbonfiberboy 

OTOH, doing long moderate rides helps endurance and fat burning ability. IME you need to do both: lots of moderate hours, which don't have to be long rides particularly, and a smaller dose of HIIT. A proportion of 80/20 to 90/10 moderate/HIIT has been found to work well.

wolfchild

Most of my time is spend at lower-medium intensities...I do 3 HIT workouts per week each one lasting about 20-35 minutes and in my experience HIT has produced a much more significant fat loss then lower intensity cardio and I don't even practice CICO or worry about calories. HIT has also greatly improved my all around fitness... Here is one of many articles on HIT vs steady state cardio: Fit with HIIT: Science Is Dropping The Hammer On Endless Bouts Of Steady-State Cardio. | SimplyShredded.com

Snicklefritz

you need your own Sticky on this forum. lol.

Snicklefritz

Interesting article. What types of routines are you using for your HIIT workouts?

Carbonfiberboy 

Beating the drum . . .
The SimplyShredded article is slightly humorous to me. We have two training limiters: time available to exercise, and time necessary to recover. Each person's values for those two variables should determine their training methodology, that is if they want to have one.

One might also want to read this, in counterpoint:
https://www.nsca.com/Education/Artic...n-Weight-Loss/

chasm54

Bingo. This is the point that is often missed in the "volume vs intensity" debate.

HIIT is great. Everyone should do some. But the proportion of one's training time that should be devoted to it should be largely determined by how much time one has to train. Obviously, if X only has two hours per day, three days per week, she can spend a fairly high proportion of that time at high intensity and still have time to recover between sessions. She won't build a huge amount of endurance, but she will get a lot faster than if she spent her six hours doing long steady distance work.

But if she has ten hours to train, she can't increase the HIIT load much, because it would be too demanding. What she can do is lower it slightly, and spend all the additional time (and maybe one or two of the original six) doing low-intensity extensive work. By doing so she'll retain the benefits of the HIIT and add the aerobic endurance component. And over time, the added volume will probably increase her ability to tolerate a higher training load, whereas simply adding more intensity would have resulted in overtraining and burnout. The longer time one spends training, of necessity the higher the proportion of that time will be low intensity. It ain't rocket science, but it seems to get lost in the argument about what is best.

wolfchild

My HIT routines involve using kettlebells, bodyweight exercises and free-weights...Majority of my cycling is done at low-moderate intensity with an occasional all out sprint.