HIIT Cardio: The new bullshit of the Fitness Influencers || All about cardio and finding the best cardiovascular regime for you

Lately, you must have seen a lot of fitness influencers talk about HIIT cardio, the afterburn effect and how amazing it is for you, the one trying to lose weight. Choose any social media platform, you will find them everywhere.

What exactly is HIIT cardio? HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training, which is basically a cardiovascular training technique used by athletes. HIIT cardio is literally doing short intensity of intense anaerobic exercise with less recovery period, until you can no longer perform the exercise any further.

You didn’t expect the last line because most influencers make HIIT look easy, isn’t it? Jumping Jacks, yeah right that’s HIIT for them or atleast that’s what they portray in front of us to get those views.

Let me help you to imagine what HIIT session actually looks like. Imagine a tiger running after you and you are gonna piss your pants but you are running for your life. Gasping, out of breath, running as fast as you possibly could to escape. That’s more accurate representation of it.

Next is the popular concept of afterburn attached to the HIIT cardio. What exactly is the afterburn effect? Afterburn or the EPOC(Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption) is basically restoration of your oxygen levels in the body, following a strenuous physical activity. Afterburn is the basically your body recovering and getting back to normal bodily functions. This truly is a calorie consuming process but it’s not as effective as we want it to be. To explain this, let’s say you completed a HIIT session and you burnt 200 calories during the session. According to reasearch, the calories burnt for the EPOC is nearly 6-15 percent of the calories burnt during the session itself. So, assuming you are a individual who uses the highest calories for afterburn (upper limit of 15 percent), which will of course not be true for every case, you will be burning approximately 30 calories over the next 72 hours. So, basically you will be burning the calories worth less than a tablespoon of regular tomato ketchup over the period of 3 days. How great is that? I will get to eat a tablespoon more ketchup over 3 days, yay!

Now, most of us aren’t athletes and don’t have the strongest cardiovascular system. Last I checked, not everyone looked shredded and fit like an olympic sprinter. So, most of us will actually be unable to complete a very short HIIT session at the first place.

A better approach will be getting a longer moderate intensity cardio session. This will actually burn more calories during the session. A moderate intensity cardio session of 20 minutes is good for a day and most of us will actually be able to complete the 20 minutes of moderate intensity cardio in the first place. The moderate intensity cardio session will also have an afterburn effect but as I have already discussed above, they are insignificant.

So, don’t get into the bullshit, these famous influencers are selling. Most people aren’t fit to do HIIT cardio and the afterburn effect is nearly insignificant and not effective as the influencers try to make us believe. Moderate intensity cardio is the way to go for us, the common mass.