By David Saadat, MD

Fitness is essential for a long healthy life

Fitness is essential for a long healthy life. Daily exercise is a crucial factor in your health equation, and can help your body become stronger and more adaptable, allowing you to feel your best. With the explosion of CrossFit in the last five years, as well as the ever growing popularity of High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), there is a workout for everyone, no matter your fitness level. While it can be overwhelming at first due to the unending number of different approaches to fitness, it is important to understand the different options available to you to allow yourself to find the best solution for you.

While it is vital to our fitness and well being to regularly challenge ourselves with tough workouts and difficult exercises, it is important to avoid doing them incorrectly. HIIT workouts, when done incorrectly, can cause unnecessary inflammation and damage to your body’s cells. These negatives can have an impact on our health over time and cause us to wear down faster, and lose our edge. One effective way to maximize results while maintaining endurance is to switch from HIIT workouts to HIRT workouts (High Intensity Repeat Training). The idea of HIRT training is to apply maximum effort in shorter spurts, utilize a longer recovery period, and fewer repetitions than HIIT training. The implication of the word “Repeat” is that you maintain a consistent effort on every repetition, rather than going “all out” for a short period of time, which can leave our bodies feeling worn out, fatigued, and damaged. The term HIRT was popularized through Dr. Marker’s thoroughly researched article titled “HIIT vs. HIRT”. In it, Dr. Marker explains the disadvantages of exerting all of our effort and energy on short bursts of extreme activity, and offers the reader a way to get more out of their workout by maintaining a near constant flow of exertion and applied effort.

His method allows our bodies to recover in a more sensible time period, and can help set us up for success by allowing our bodies to maintain strength and energy, rather than depleting all of our endurance in a short time. Dr. Marker’s article can be found at BreakingMuscle.com, and is a must read for anyone looking to get the most from their workouts!