The other night at dinner we asked our five year old the question of which came first, the chicken or the egg? She thought about it briefly and then answered confidently saying the egg. To which we then asked her where the egg came from? You can imagine the puzzled look on her face and could see the wheels turning in her head. She realized she it was going to be a hard question to answer. This can be similar to exercise with respect to whether you should do long, slow steady-state exercise or short, high intensity intervals. The last few years have seen a surge in HIIT i.e. high intensity interval training, Tabata and other intense training protocols. However during COVID we have also seen a number of endurance feats including Everesting, round the world cycling challenges and other long distance endurance challenges. So which one is it? Should we go hard and short or long and slow? Well a recent Canadian study looked to answer this question. Here's what they did. Twenty three adult, sedentary men were divided into two groups. One group did 30 second sprint intervals on the bike with two minutes rest. They repeated this four to six times and completed this workout three times per week. Over the course of the six study they completed almost one hour of cycling. The other group rode the bike five times per week for 30-40 minutes at around 60% of their peak power. By the completion of the study this group had logged 15 hours on the bike. Researchers wanted to know the impact these would have on fitness, body composition and blood pressure. What they found is that those performing the endurance workouts i.e. 30-40 minutes of cycling saw greater improvements in: diastolic blood pressureabdominal fatpostprandial lipid...

It seems like high intensity interval training (HIIT) is all the rage these days. Anyone can do it at anytime as frequently as they like and achieve amazing results. Sound too good to be true? That's probably because it is. If you're not familiar with HIIT you may be more familiar with the Tabata protocol or some other version of high intensity short duration exercise. Let me re-phrase that. You may be familiar with the name Tabata but it's unlikely you're familiar with the actual protocol of the study performed by the researcher of the same name. So why is the general population going crazy over HIIT or Tabatas? Well because the landmark study, and others by researchers such as Dr. Martin Gibala, indicate that you can achieve weight loss, improved aerobic function and potential performance with a fraction of the time invested in training as is normally thought to be necessary. Now before I give you some things to consider before jumping into HIIT or Tabatas at your next training session let's quickly review what the Tabata protocol involved. While two groups participated in the study the one we are interested in is the short duration, high intensity group. They did:* sprints on a braked cycle ergometer* 7 or 8 sprints of 20 seconds in duration* 10 seconds rest between sprint attempts* at an intensity of 170% VO2 max* for a 6 week period Now there are a number of things to be aware of here when comparing this protocol to what many exercisers believe there are following when they workout. So with that in mind here are 4 Reasons You're Not Doing Tabatas. Reason #1 - You're not on a bike While it's true there are many benefits of cross-training it's a bit of a stretch to do something...