I am beginning a HIIT approach to getting fitter, and am going to use this space to blog my workouts, how they feel, if I'm improving, and generally how it goes.
I've been a big girl my entire life. I've never not been a big girl, from my earliest memories in elementary school on. In my 20's, at size 24W, I began a diet and exercise program, dropped a bunch of weight slowly over several years and got down to a size 14. Then marriage, motherhood, and I sit now at a solid 18W.
I have been an exerciser for the past 15 years or so. I like to do cardio, and enjoy it, at a good pace with fast music on. Typically I build up to doing more and more time of whatever cardio it is that I'm into at the moment, generally up to 45 minutes of walking, NordicTrak, StairMaster, Elliptical, Exercycle, workout video.. I tend to do one thing for a long time, get bored with it, stop for a while, then begin exercising again on something new. While I have lost weight with this approach, I've never really gotten fitter, felt leaner, stronger, faster, better. And generally, I don't actually lose much weight with this, even though long periods of cardio are supposed to burn tons of calories.
The one time I did feel leaner and stroner was when I added strength-training to the mix.
Today I was reading a marvelous fitness blog (MizFit, if anyone wants to know). The subject was a letter from a reader, and MizFit responded that sometimes it is important to do less on the cardio, to get more benefit, and less on the strength, to get stronger. It probably would not have had so much impact on me, except there were a ton of comments. Curious, I started rolling through them. Lots and lots of people agreed with her, and stated that they used to do 45 minutes or 1 hour of cardio and saw virtually no benefit from it. When they dropped to 20-25 minute bouts of cardio at HIIT level, and added strength 2 or 3 times a week for a similar time period, the results were fast and spectacular. People were truly saying that for less time invested, they got more benefits.
Now that is something I can get on with.
So beginning today, I am going to do 25 minutes of cardio workouts, but change focus to really work the workout. My HIIT level may not be quite what anyone else will expect, I am after all, out of shape and overweight, but I'm going to make that 25 minutes count. And, twice a week I will add strength. Probably a home routine that I have now and can certainly do a lot more of, and add machines and gym equipment sometime in the future when I feel more confident. I also will do my yoga more frequently and consistently. My plan is that this blog keeps me going, and that I can look back at it and see my progress and always feel motiviated.
So, my very first HIIT workout today was...
25 minutes on the treadmill at home. I did 5 minutes warm up, and 5 minutes cool down. For the 15 minutes in between I kept the low speed at 4.0 as much as possible, though a couple times it went down to 3.7. I wanted to get over 5mph on the running, and I did, doing several minutes at 5.4, and did one stretch of 30 seconds at 5.7. 5.7 was hard, at the 30 seconds I had a stitch in my side and was breathing like a walrus. Keeping up the 4.0 in between the faster running sessions was also hard, I so badly wanted to lower the speed into the high 3's just to have that rest. That did happen once or twice, but for the most part I pushed myself and kept going. For distance, I made 1.54 miles in 25 minutes.
I feel good that I did it, and I feel that 1.54 miles is respectable, especially since I was tracking my distance in earlier non-HIIT days and I beat my previous 26 minute time (One minute more, doncha know).
Tomorrow I will do my strength. Or yoga, I love the way that makes me feel too.
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