First of all, let me say that I hope all of you and your families are safe in this difficult times! Ourselves, of the Budget Fitness Crew, we are currently quarentined in the centre of France due to the spread of the Coronavirus, aka Covid-19. For that, we feel you frustration and lack of motivation, but we want to help you in continuing your workouts and improve your days whilst this confinement.
“It’s during difficult times that we appreciate our freedoms”. This pretty much summarizes how we all feel right now. Not being able to go out, practice sports outdoors and enjoy the good weather are all discouraging contingencies. But not all is lost friends, we can always get back on the right track and pursue our goals. Fitness is no exception. We may need to do some changes, adapt our favorite activities but we can still have the same results. And it’s in this context that I want to introduce you (if you don’t now it yet) to the HIT, or High Intensity Training. This category of workout combines good cardio, high freqeuncy exercises and a lot of good sweating. And the catch? The catch is that you don’t have to go further than your living room.
Before explaining how to practice HIT, it’s better if we contextualize it a bit. HIT or HIIT (if you add Intervals in the routine), burns more calories in less time than steady state cardio.
It has also been proven to boosts the metabolism and to continue in process of burning fats even after the workout (called “after burn effect”). If you’re even a higher-achiever you may want to pair it with any form of resistance training e.g. calisthenics… this will prevent you from losing any lean muscles mass and adding a stronger burn effect to the fats.
An HIT workout can be structured in many ways, but it need to respect some guidelines to be effective. Firstly, it needs to combine “parallel exercises” (which means all the exercises that require you to stay parallel to the ground, such as crunches, abs, planque and push-ups) with “vertical exercises” ( once again it refers to the position, it includes burpees, squats, squat frog, jump squats, leg kicks-in, etc). Secondly, rest in between exercises is necessary but it needs to be brief, around 10/15 seconds would be best. This is in order to keep your body under constant resistance but allow you to continue in the routine without cracking. A good routine is no shorter than 8 minutes and no longer than 11.
A good starting point is to choose a plan of exercises and stick with that for two or three weeks. This will help you keep track of you progress and your stamina. If you find it easy to quickly than you should repeat the routine twice or more. If you do all these steps, I guarantee you’ll feel painlfully satisfied by the end of it.
Now let’s give you an example to start with. Personally I find the following routine as one of the most effective (p.s. HIT exercises are time-based and not repetition-based).
HIIT Workout example
15 seconds rest in between exercises, repeat twice or more if too doable
- Burpees 45 seconds
- Mountain Climbers 45 seconds
- Squat Jumps 45 seconds
- Plank Knee To Elbow 45 seconds
- Frog Squats 45 seconds
- Knee To Chest Crunches 45 seconds
- Kick Sits In 45 seconds
- Side Jumps 45 seconds
- Plank Raises 45 seconds
So remember, it’s in difficult times that you need to prove to yourself how badly you want it and this a perfect opportunity for you. Use it wisely and don’t lose vision of your objectives, you can make it, our Budget Fitness Crew is with you along the way!
Budget Fitness 