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How to Add Variety to HIIT Workouts

Simple Ways to Add Variety to Your HIIT Workouts

One of the reasons I love HIIT workouts so much is the endless variety they provide. As a personal trainer, it means I can adapt a HIIT workouts to suit a wide range of clients and goals. I do the same with my own training.

Here are a few ideas of how to add variety to HIIT workouts…

Adjust the Weight you lift in HIIT Workouts

avoid injury whilst strength training, HIIT workouts

If you dig around my website, you’ll find strength based HIIT workouts and HIIT workouts with a lower weight.

Don’t pigeon-hole HIIT as a cardio workout protocol. With a few simple tweaks you can turn HIIT into a serious strength or hypertrophy workout. By adjusting load/volume you can design the workout to fit your requirements.

For examples, check out these two workouts…

Adjust your Rest Periods

prowler suicides, HIIT workouts

Within the confines of a HIIT workout, the amount of rest you take will determine largely the intensity and duration of the workout.

As a very general rule, the shorter the rest periods, the higher the intensity and therefore the shorter and more anaerobic the workout.

A classic example of this can been in a Tabata workout. The Tabata system uses a work/rest ratio of 20 seconds work:10 seconds recovery. Such short rest periods make the intensity of the work very high, but the workout only lasts for 4 minutes.

By increasing the amount of rest between sets you can modify the outcomes and duration of the workout.

Longer rest and recovery between sets means the workout will be longer in duration, but it would also be beneficial if the workout required a lot of volume and contained large numbers of complex compound movements such as cleans, snatches, thrusters etc.

The longer rest period would allow for more adequate recovery and therefore better execution of the workout movements.

For a fat loss HIIT workout, I would explore shorter rests, shorter duration but higher intensity workloads.

Adjust the Duration of Your HIIT workouts

You can use HIIT protocols as the entire workout or simply a finisher. Either way, they can be adjusted to suit the needs of the individual.

In the case of a beginner or at the start of a new phase of training, I would use a HIIT workout protocol typically as a finisher. This means the HIIT element of the workout is kept to a minimum.

I’d do this because when a person is new to exercise or are undergoing a new phase of training, the physical and mental demands of HIIT training may be a step too far and distract the personal training client or exerciser from the main work element of the session.

If you are established into a training phase or are an experienced exerciser, by all means use a HIIT workout protocol for the bulk of your training as long as it aligns with your goals. Following the other advice in the article you realise you can add variety to your HIIT workouts to suit the needs of the situation, so explore this variety.

Mix up the Body Parts you Train in your HIIT Workouts

hiit tyre workout, HIIT workouts

If you like to follow a spilt routine, you can adjust your HIIT workouts to fit the split you follow. I personally use HIIT-based protocols such as supersets and giant sets with muscle building clients because they are an excellent way of adding volume without increasing the length of the workout.

If you have an injury or a particular body part that requires additional work, a HIIT approach focussing on that body part can be a fantastic way to bring it up to scratch.

In the workout below I purposely kept the weights high and the rest periods short to turn it into a HIIT based workout, allowing me to hit my lower body with a lot of volume, high weights and all in a short period of time.

Thighway to Hell Workout

This split-routine approach to your HIIT workouts is ideal when you are injured. By switching up the body parts you focus on with your HIIT workouts, you can still train even when you are carrying certain injuries – simply design your workout to make sure you don’t aggravate the injury.

There are plenty of other ways you can add variety to your HIIT workouts including using heart rate data to assess your state of recovery and to determine work sets, but I will save those for another post. These ways are enough to get your started mixing up your HIIT workouts!

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HoylesFitness

Owner of www.hoylesfitness.com. Personal Trainer, Father and fitness copy writer. Working hard making the world fitter and healthier!

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