Hiit how much per week

Your lungs need to burn. Your muscles need to burn. If it's not hard -- really hard -- then you're not doing a HIIT workout. Roughly speaking, your "on" effort should be at 80 to 90 percent of max heart rate, and your recovery period at 65 to 70 percent.

In general terms, you can calculate your max heart rate by subtracting your age from Or if you're doing longer "on" sessions, you may rest completely for shorter periods of time; it all depends on the workout. But then again, you'll finish exercising in a third of the time it takes to grind your way through an hour-long spin class. In a high intensity interval workout, your body release stress hormones like cortisol. Cortisol can enhance strength, improve immunity and reduce inflammation.

With that said, too much has a negative effect on your body, and therefore, too much HIIT can also have negative effects. The key is recovery. There is a lot of research into this type of exercise and its effects on the body. That translates on average to two 30 to minute HIIT workouts a week. So, two a week would be just fine. Start first with a mix of cardio and weight training times per week.

Once your body is conditioned and your physical fitness is strong, begin by adding one HIIT workout to your routine a week in place of your usual cardio workout. HIIT can really be applied to most workouts.

Whatever your exercise of choice, remember that half of HIIT stands for high-intensity. Weight Loss. United States. But you can have too much of a good thing. But your body is only able to handle a certain amount of stress at once. The effects of cortisol can be positive; enhanced strength, improved immunity, and reduced inflammation. But we have long suspected that too much high-intensity exercise can compromise this effect.

Short term increases in cortisol help the body repair, adapt and grow stronger. Long term increases in cortisol can cause fatigue, joint pain, and mood disturbance.

There are many factors that make HIIT so effective, including pushing your heart rate into a specific training zone; impact forces greater than ten times your body weight; and performing exercises until failure.

Because of these extreme characteristics, says Gottschall, it is imperative to adequately recover between sessions. In fact, it can actually have a negative impact. Based on this she hypothesized that approximately minutes of intensity above 85 percent max per week is optimal to allow for proper recovery and ideal performance.

This newest study backs up this recommendation, and narrows in on the range to show that minutes above 90 percent maximum per week is the recommended total. Research shows that minutes of training with your heart rate above 90 percent is a suggested maximum cumulative time per week, in order to prevent symptoms of overreaching.