HIIT Training

HIIT workouts are a prime example of what people believe to be FAT BURNING WORKOUTS.

In reality these workouts are just very sweaty, very tiring workouts that burn a lot of energy for 15/30 minutes.

Let’s say you use 300 calories doing one of those.

If those 300 calories burned don’t create a calorie deficit, you will not be losing or burning fat. Irrespective of how sweaty you are, or how out of breath you are or how hot you get.

Sweating has no relevance to fat loss. Let me make that perfectly clear.

The only factor you are manipulating with sweat is your water weight.

So if you are dehydrated from a workout and are lighter that is literally because you have less water in your body, nothing to do with fat.

So if they don’t burn fat, what is the benefit of these workouts?

Well they don’t take a lot of time to do. They can mostly be done anywhere with limited equipment. You will get fitter doing them consistently.

However this type of exercise has CONs as well

they are based predominantly around high impact exercises – which is not good for your joints, especially you are someone who is perhaps overweight and a novice when it comes to training

these workouts are often quite extreme and tough, simply for the sake of it. You can make any workout as tiring as possible. It’s not a good thing. Training is not meant to feel like punishment.

Unsurprisingly because of this people often don’t actually enjoy these workouts, they only do them because they think that’s what they need

The reality is that no one is going to continue to do a form of exercise they don’t enjoy, so inevitably any results that people get aren’t sustained.

Now you know you don’t have to do any certain type of training to “burn fat”,

you can focus on finding a form of activity or training that you do enjoy, and therefore will sustain long term.

If you do enjoy HIIT workouts, then that’s great, continue doing them, I just want to ensure that no one is doing them simply because they believe they have to.