High Intensity Training (HIT Training) is a proven method for superior size and strength building than other methods. The HIT Training regime provides muscles with enough stimuli to ensure rapid growth. The core principles of HIT Training illustrate that strength training should be intense, brief and infrequent.
High Intensity Training requires you to work out till you are completely exhausted, that is the point where your muscle cannot budge an inch, let alone lift more weight. If you have done some strength training you will know how it feels after a long session of training when the body is exhausted and you feel that someone has sucked the energy out of you. This is when you stop training, pack your equipment and return home.
HIT Training is different, it focuses on the point that you need to exercise to a point where your muscles face momentary failure. Normally when we train, we leave training when we are tired as described in the preceding paragraph. But if you are going to follow HIT Training you should not stop at that moment, you should push your body to the limit and try a couple of more reps. Squeeze some more reps at this point and you reach the famous magic point or break over point. Now you will see real growth in your muscles.
To reach the break over or magic point you can use a number of techniques. You can do the following:
- Slowly increase the number of reps you do every time you go to the gym
- Give your workout sessions a time limit and spend no more than a minute between the exercises
- Change up your workout every 6 to 8 weeks
If you follow High Intensity Training correctly, your body will be extremely tired and you will feel unmatched fatigue after workout, whereas in Low Intensity Training you may not feel much fatigue, especially if you have done the same exercise in the past.
So if you want to grow your muscles, you will constantly need to challenge yourself to achieve higher limits. But be careful when doing strength training according to HIT Training as you should exercise with proper technique to avoid serious injury to your muscles. Take help from a qualified trainer to ensure your safety and quicker results.
What’s So Great About High Intensity Training?
This approach works scientifically to build muscle and strengthen it. It focuses on quality weightlifting where the intensity is given preference over number of reps. A high intensity short period exercise with defined pauses tends to cause temporary muscular failure (for very short period of time).
HIT Training has been successfully publicized by many great body builders like former Mr. America, Mick Mentzer, Ellington Darden and Bill Phillips, the author of “Body for Life”.
High intensity training is based on the concept of pushing the body to its limit. Mentzer calls this the “break over point” and Phillips terms it as “the high point”. At this point the muscle is stressed to a level that muscle growth is stimulated, below it nothing happens and according to HIT Training advocates, any training which does not reach the high point is useless.
When exercising according to the HIT Training principle, you will focus on reaching a state where you cannot lift the weight again. Rather you cannot lift anything due to tiredness, this is the point Mentzer & Phillips were talking about. Your muscles are designed in a way that they don’t grow unless they are pushed to their limits. So you should completely exhaust your muscles because only then will they start to grow.
According to the books written by both of the above writers, there are two possibilities, either you will grow muscle or not. It means your training can be a huge success or a bad failure, it cannot happen that your training sometimes give you results and sometimes doesn’t. According to Mentzer, the body is like dynamite and strength training is a hammer. If you keep hitting dynamite repeatedly with a hammer but without the required force, nothing will happen. But if you hit it once with the required force, the dynamite will explode. Hence, you should alway shoot for the high point in high intensity training.
For performing some strength training according to the HIT Training principle you will have to train from the heart and soul. Usually when you think you are tired and stop training, you actually aren’t tired yet; you can do a rep or two if you try hard. This is where break over point is reached and you start building muscle!
Five Reasons Why HIT Training Is Better Than Light Intensity Training
The principle that exercises should be brief, infrequent and intense is the core of HIT training. Advocates of this form of strength training believe that to stimulate the body to produce an extra increase in muscular size and strength there is no better principle than High Intensity Training.
HIT training emphasizes that the body needs time for recovery so that every time you visit the gym you pumped and ready to work. Here are five reasons why High Intensity Training is better than Low Intensity Training for burning fat:
- Our bodies are designed in a way that they can adapt and improvise according to the given situation. When the body is put in a similar situation time and again, it learns to adjust itself according to that situation; hence a baseball player pounces on the ball in split second without thinking! When we are working out and increasing reps, a stage is reached when further increasing the number of reps and hence decreasing effort being put in by the body. To achieve maximum results, one should decrease the number of reps and increase the intensity of the workout.
- After a workout according to the HIT training principle, the body consumes a lot of oxygen and energy in the form of calories.
- In working out using HIT training methods, your body is consuming carbohydrates. So if you do not eat carbohydrates after High Intensity Training, your body turns to consume its fat for energy.
- The rest-pause technique used in High Intensity Training is very effective as it has the advantages of conventional power training and it allows enough number of reps to be performed for HIT training purposes.
- High Intensity Training is a proven technique to build muscles fast as it was used by many great body builders like former Mr. America, Mick Mentzer.
HIT training has been used by many professional body builders when the other routine stopped giving them desired results. Using HIT Training exclusively will give you better results than using it combined with conventional methods.
How HIT Training Is Turning All We Know About Bodybuilding On Its Head!
HIT Training (high intensity training) is revolutionizing the way we look at weight training and for good reason. Though high intensity training has become increasingly more well known, many individuals choose to ignore the practical philosophy behind it and continue using tired training principles to only obtain mediocre results. On top of that the bodybuilding industry definitely won’t endorse it anytime soon because HIT Training speaks against using the masses of supplements that account for the millions of dollars made in the weight training industry. For this reason high intensity training will most likely stay an underground weight lifting methodology that only a small hardcore percentage of bodybuilders and athletes train with to turn their bodies into high performance machines working out only a fraction of the time that everyone else does.
The reason why it works so well in regards to building muscle fast is that when you lift, you perform one set per exercise to absolute momentary muscular failure. Training in this form sets off a natural adaptive response in your body which causes muscle growth to occur much more dramatically. The classic multiple lifting set philosophy will give you some results because doing something is better than nothing. However, it will be apparent over a short period of time that HIT training will do more for building muscle than any supplement or multiple set workout can (unless of course you’re using steroids!).
The growth that you see a result of lifting weights generally comes from the building up of fast twitch muscle fiber which is for short term strength and speed. They’re not all that efficient for running long distances at a steady even pace. This is why football players are so big, bulky, and fast while marathon runners are so skinny. Even though this is somewhat obvious, a lot of guys have this mentality that they need to do more reps and sets in order to build more muscle. What HIT Training preaches though is that, less overall work at greater intensity will always be more. And what I mean by less is only being in the gym for less than an hour. Anymore working out after the hour mark is useless and even counterproductive. 30 minutes, twice a week is all I need when HIT Training and I see fantastic results from it.
Crossing The Point Of Failure In High Intensity Training
If you really want to build muscle fast then forget Light Intensity Training & switch to High Intensity Training. You may find HIT Training challenging and difficult to start due to extra effort needed to reach the magic point or point of failure. However, the rewards are great in this method of training.
So when you are just starting the High Intensity Training regime you should keep the following points in mind as these will help you cross the point of failure:
- Perform the exercises correctly; if you exert stress on your muscles at the wrong angles or use too much momentum to lift the weight you can damage your body, so safety must always be your priority.
- Engage a partner or a friend to help you or hire a trainer. Everyone who does strength training knows the importance of a helper when it comes down to hitting the last rep. You get to a point where you just can’t gather enough strength to complete one last full rep and that’s when your spotter can jump in to help you just enough so that you can push one rep pas failure and inspire a deeper level of fatigue.
- In H.I.T. Training you may find it hard at first to mentally and physically push yourself to your utter limits. Having a spotter on hand will also help in that they can push you and motivate you to reach a number of reps you didn’t even know you were capable of.
- Close your eyes, relax your face, and literally focus on the muscles you are targeting during the exercise. It’s too easy to get distracted by all the people walking around the gym which can ruin your ability to truly reach your failing point. By closing your eyes, and maybe even wearing ear plugs, you erase 2 distracting stimuluses so that you can focus 100% on the exercise. By focusing on relaxing your face as well, you take the distracting tension out of the muscles of your face, and let only the tension of the muscle being trained occupy your efforts.
- When you reach your absolute failure point, try taking off a few weights and going another few reps until your reach failure for a second time. At the final rep of an 8-12 rep exercise, you’ve pretty much pushed your muscles to where the weight you’ve just lifted is too much in it’s fatigued stage. so to push your muscles into an even deeper level of fatigue, do the same immediately after(with practically no break) using a little less weight. Doing a few more reps after you are completely drained will work wonders for muscle building.
The magic point of failure is what high intensity training is all about. Remember these few techniques during your next hit training workout and see if they don’t help blast your muscles to levels of fatigue you didn’t even know you were capable of reaching.
Why You Should Switch to High Intensity Weight Training
High Intensity Weight Training on its inception was supported by late body builder Mike Mentzer and six time Mr. Olympia winner, Dorian Yates. At the beginning, High Intensity Training was surrounded by much controversy as it was hard to believe that lesser reps of the same exercise can yield better results. But now this formerly controversial method has established itself as a strength building system followed by millions around the world(& growing).
High Intensity Weight Training has been successfully applied and its theory has been verified by many body builders. This technique has worked wonders for muscle building as the impulse to grow is huge. But still this method does not get the appreciation it deserves because many people related with the strength building industry see it with skepticism. The reason for this is that they are used to ‘old ways’ of high volume training which were heavily advocated by such lifter as Arnold Schwarzenegger. They simply cannot understand how a method with lower reps can reap similar or even better results.
Despite it being a proven system of muscle building which is easy to implement and saves time, many people still to this day refuse to adopt it. We should try to understand why people feel it difficult to break from the conventional training techniques which encourage more and more reps of the same exercise for muscle building. There are a number of factors which stop people from switching to High Intensity Weight Training. Let’s discuss a few of these:
- Most of body building fans have a superstar body builder in mind, they see them posing and showing their huge muscles on magazines, commercials and TV shows. These professional body builders usually show off their massive muscles while demonstrating that they can do a lot of reps very comfortably. This gets wired in the brain of the viewer and he believes that to grow huge muscles, he will have to do a lot of reps of each exercise.
- These superstars use drug to enhance their muscle growth as they have to compete in various body building competitions.
- There’s always that mentality that doing more will always get you more. The truth of the matter is, it’s always going to be more effective to train smarter, not longer.
But most of the people want to be drug free and build muscles to have a strong and fit body. For this propose High Intensity Weight Training is the best option as it takes less time and delivers better results faster.