The benefits to cardiovascular exercise are great and different exercises one can perform to achieve a quality cardio session seems to be endless!

Many people, including myself, usually jump on a treadmill or elliptical machine and start pumping until the amount of calories we want burned is dust, or simply put in enough time that we’re satisfied with the day’s effort. This isn’t a bad way to go, and can get the job done thoroughly, however un-entertaining…the bottom line, it works.

So…if it ain’t broke then why fix it, right? Well, maybe because there is a better way to bust out a great cardio workout that will push your body much harder and be better for your overall health! I am talking about High Intensity Interval Training!

High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) is an exercise strategy intended to improve performance with short training sessions. It’s a form of training that is also intended to burn lots of calories in a short, intense workout. These workouts usually go from 15 to 30-minutes and typically have a 2:1 ratio, which means if you are exercising on a treadmill you would jog for 60 seconds and then sprint for 30 seconds.

You would do that about 6-8 times making sure that when you are sprinting you are really giving a solid effort and cranking up the intensity. To surmise: High Intensity Interval Training is when you have several short, maximum-effort intervals that are separated by moderate recovery intervals. This will burn a lot of calories and can be down usually in about 15-minutes.

Now you know what High Intensity Interval Training involves, but why exactly should you do it instead of just hopping on a treadmill or elliptical machine and turning the speed up for 20 minutes, then moving on? Well, the answer is that there have been numerous studies proving that this method is more effective at burning fat and maintaining or building muscle mass than more frequent lower intensity cardio workouts.

In fact, some studies have shown that about 2.5 hours of interval training equals about 10.5 hours of normal endurance training. Doing High Intensity Interval Training will also help boost your metabolism after you are down working out. Unlike traditional endurance exercising (getting on a treadmill or other cardio machine and using it for a specific amount of time at the same speed) High Intensity Interval Training boosts your metabolism after you are done, just like when you lift weights.

This happens because you are pushing yourself and challenging the body more when you’re performing HIIT’s, and that will help to spike your metabolism and make fat loss easier. High Intensity Intervals are similar to weight training exercises and that is why they are more beneficial then traditional cardio training, gotta’ be a uber-intense nature!

Let’s crunch the numbers! Low intensity exercising is classified of having roughly 60% of your maximum heart rate. While high intensity exercise you are working about 75% of your maximum heart rate. So to calculate your maximum heart rate you just take 220 and subtract your age. So, for example…if I was 25 my max. heart rate would be 195. So working at 60% of my maximum heart rate I’d arrive at 117 bpm and 80% would equal 156 bpm.

At those rates low intensity burns 50% of stored fat for energy and high intensity burns 40% of the fat for energy. So now, let’s plug those into say, a 30-minute walk on a treadmill. That would burn about 150 calories and since it is a low intensity exercise it would burn about 50% fat calories for energy, giving me a total of 75 fat calories burned from walking for 30-minutes.

Now, if I do say, 15-minutes of High Intensity Interval Training then that would burn roughly 240 calories. Since high intensity training burns 40% fat for energy that would mean I burned 96 fat calories. So, I’ve burned more calories in half the time by doing High Intensity Interval Training, compared to a less intense cardio workout. The numbers back up claims of greatness!

HIIT really does deliver MORE bang for your buck. You get better results in less time, it isn’t as boring as going the same speed through out the whole cardio exercise and it boosts your metabolism long after your are done performing it, making fat loss easier. So workout smart…and incorporate some High Intensity Interval Training, for the win!