Previous posts have looked at some of the benefits of running and whether there is a time of day to get maximum benefit out of running, and whether or not morning is the very best time of day to run.
In this post I’ll briefly look at how to give your metabolism an extra boost and burn more calories with a shorter workout.
The key to burning more calories or gaining extra benefit from your exercise is intensity.
This applies to whether you are running, lifting weights, doing weight or resistance training – any kind of workout that you do. The type of running workout I’m referring to is called HIIT or High Intensity Interval Training.
With HIIT you will burn more calories, your metabolism gets an extra (fat burning) boost, and you will boost other systems in your body as well (production of certain hormones). The great news is that you can get these benefits without going to the same extremes mentioned in the previous post on boosted metabolism. Some of you may find that doing a warmup and then HIIT is all you need to do to reach your fitness goals (if you plan to run races or with friends, I’d recommend training for those distances in addition to doing HIIT.
So how do you do HIIT? It’s not just a matter of running “all out” or burning yourself out at max speed and then walking for a while. While there is a great degree of variation on what people mean by HIIT and how to actually do it I believe there is an optimal approach for the typical person seeking to live a healthy lifestyle. In my next post I’ll give you my instructions on how to do HIIT the mrhlth way, some variations you can try depending on your schedule and goals, and benefits you can expect to gain from it.
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