How Can Your Body Benefit From High Intensity Training Workouts?

The opposite of a high intensity training workout is probably what you see in most fitness centers across the country. Scan the room and you watch people on treadmills and exercise bikes reading a book, watching television or even talking with others. Forget the chitchat if you’re serious about crafting a new look for your body. Intensity, not talk, will give you results.

Adopt a High Intensity Training Workout Routine

Muscles need to be pushed in order to grow. Through a high intensity training workout routine that puts a heavy load on the muscles you’re targeting, you should place enough resistance, in most cases that means additional weight selection on the machine, in order to get full exhaustion from those muscles. How can you tell when muscle exhaustion is reached? When you absolutely can’t push or pull the weight on the machine one more time, you’ve reached exhaustion in your muscles. This is known as momentary musculature failure or complete muscle fatigue.

The key to this type of workout is that you don’t go with what’s easy and blast out 20 or 50 repetitions of a given exercise. Instead, you select a harder setting  to perform about 8 to  12 repetitions in a thoroughly deliberate fashion with a slow speed of motion that’s free from swift and jerky movements. This takes less time per workout and gives your muscles the most benefit.

The end result of your high intensity training exercises is to push your heart rate to a maximum.  We do this by utilizing all of your Anaerobic Glycolysis.  You see your aerobic glycolysis is similar to your gas tank, in which it holds ATP- your body’s fuel.  The gas station would be your Anaerobic Glycolysis which has 9 times the amount of ATP and it fuels the Aerobic Glycolysis.  So during high intensity training where the demand for fuel is so high, you actually burn through all of the body’s ATP from both the “tank” aka Aerobic and the “station” aka Anaerobic and you are left with momentary failure.  This is the absolute best way to get cardiovascular benefits because all veins and arteries open up 3 times faster (than that of steady state activity) and take twice as long to shrink back down.  You will feel it, and best yet your heart rate stays up for a long period of time after workouts, unlike that of just a run or jog, where its up, but the second you stop it falls within a matter of minutes. Gasping for breath and feeling like you cannot expend another second of energy is a normal feeling when you’re at your maximum intensity. 

Lose Weight, Not Time with High Intensity Training Workouts for Men and Women

One of the best benefits with adhering to high intensity workouts is that all you need is 30 minutes of workout time each week. That equals just three tenths of one percent of a seven-day period of time. So, while your friends are blasting away time and energy watching television for hours in the fitness center, you’re off living your life with your friends and family doing the things you really love.

Recovery is very important with a high intensity workout. When pushed to the maximum, muscles need time to recuperate. It’s during this convalescent time that the growth hormone is surged out to build lean muscle mass.  However, if another workout is done too soon it is possible that you can inhibit the process from happening all together, because now your body needs to focus on the current exercise and can forgo the growth mechanism, because heck, it is capable of doing the current, so it doesn’t need it.  Your body is smart… you have to out-smart it! That’s why it’s important to follow a high intensity workout with  a minimum of 48 hours to in some cases a full week of muscle recovery is necessary.  The recovery time can be determined once your Certified Trainer is familiar with your body and its slow twitch and fast twitch muscle fibers.

Stimulating muscle growth while burning away fat is best accomplished using full intensity strength training workouts in a deliberate, slow and methodical manner. It’s harder for your muscles to maintain a slow speed while under resistance and it is much easier to use force and momentum to get quickly through the exercise routine. So, when you slow down your actions you turn your exercise into pure muscle loading with no help from speed, giving it that heavy and hard feeling of high intensity training for your muscles. Think of it as yoga on machines with heavy weights.  If you took a microscope into your working muscles during some high intensity calisthenics, you would see a larger number of connections between protein fibers which produce movement in your muscle. Through the recovery time, this same muscle builds back to an even stronger and larger muscle.

The kind of exercise regimen outlined here boosts your body’s metabolism because muscle in fact burns more calories than fat and therefore dictates your overall metabolism. And that simply means more calories are burned up every day even at rest. It also equates to using up and burning those fat deposits sitting around on your body.

If you’re worried, because you don’t want to get “pumped up” to the point that you look like Arnold Schwarzenegger, remember that genetics is a huge factor leading to the building of massive muscles in the human body. Most men and very few women have the ability to conjure up body-building physiques through this kind of exercising. When your most important goals are improved health and a longer life, looking like Arnold becomes a second-fiddle aspiration.

Although women don’t often like the idea of bulking up, have no fear, full intensity training builds lean muscle mass. Typical strength training can cause microtrauma, tearing the muscle fiber, which stimulates the bodies repair mechanism inducing inflammation over the muscle. Then additional muscle is laid over this inflammation and causes that bulky feeling. Another type of anxiety occurs when a higher figure is seen after stepping on the scale. Just remember that tight and trim muscles weigh more on your body than if that same space is taken up by fat. Just because the scale tells you that you weigh more, doesn’t mean that you’re fat. A slimmer you with well-sculpted muscles thanks to high intensity training workouts might actually weigh more than if the frame of your body includes an overabundance of fat.