For the article of the week this week, we review an article from the New York Times that outlines some of the problems with high intensity exercise. You can find the article here:

Too Much High-Intensity Exercise May Be Bad for Your Health

High intensity interval training often called HIIT usually is done in an aerobic workout on a treadmill or bike in which you have brief periods of all out intensity trying to fully exhaust your muscles and then a brief rest period before you go all out again. This exercise technique is a great way to improve your athletic performance as well as being a great way to lose weight, however it does have some draw backs. Some of these draw backs were outlined in this article.

This study had 11 participants, male and female and it put them through a series of HIIT training sessions on an exercise bike over the course of a month. It found that after two weeks, the participants were able to go harder for longer on the exercise bike, which is great news. However, after week three, they noticed a dip in performance which was linked to a decrease in the amount of energy the participant’s mitochondria were producing. The study took muscle biopsies to gauge mitochondrial health. The authors concluded that too much HIIT can be dangerous and should be limited to a few times a week.

This seems like a reasonable conclusion to me. However, there are some parts of the study that weren’t tracked that can play a huge role in how your body responds to hard workouts. These things are sleep and nutrition. Hard workouts require hard recovery. You can’t leave recovery up to chance. You need to plan out your rest time just as much as your workouts. Proper nutrition and sleep are key to fully recover from these workouts. Without them, your body will never fully recover and you will eventually see diminishing returns from your workouts, like the participants in this study. To learn more about this study and what we thought about it in detail, listen to this week’s podcast.