HIIT versus HIRT

Your feelings don’t matter! That is, your subjective feeling of the effectiveness of a workout is not important as what science tells us is important to building an impressive base of endurance and changing your body composition. A common training method is high-intensity interval training (HIIT).

This type of training leaves people on the floor in a pool of sweat feeling as if they have accomplished a great workout. In this article, I propose a smarter way of training, which should have a greater effect on endurance and long-term body composition effects. This high-intensity repeat training (HIRT) may not ‘feel’ as good, but your feelings don’t matter.

History of HIIT

Interval training with high intensities has been around for years. The tipping point of HIIT seems to have come with the research of Dr. Izumi Tabata. In the early 1990s, he collaborated with Irisawa Koichi, the Japanese speed skating team coach who had developed a protocol of short maximum bursts of sprints followed by short periods of rest. These short maximum burst improved and maintained peak performance in elite speed skating athletes. Tabata wanted to test the protocol with athletes at different levels.

The initial Tabata paper from 1996 examined two groups of amateur athletic males in their mid-twenties:

1. The first group pedaled on…