Is HIIT training aerobic or anaerobic? Today we're going to explain it so that you can
set some good goals both for your fitness and your health.
Hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly
master health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you
subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. There's
a lot of confusion about training and aerobic and anaerobic, cortisol, blood
sugar... so we're gonna talk a little bit about this today so that you can set
some good goals and understand why you're doing it depending on what your
health and fitness goals are. So let's assume that you have a resting heart
rate of about 60 that's if you're in pretty good shape a lot of people are
anywhere from 60 up to 80 so if you can get it closer to 60 then you've got a
stronger heart and a little bit better oxygen utilization. So that's about
thirty percent of your maximum heart rate and from 60 up to about 120 is what
we call the aerobic range that means that your body is providing oxygen or
air at a sufficient pace to keep up with the exercise so because you're keeping
up you can keep doing it for hours this would be leisurely - a fast walk it
could be a bike ride something that you can keep up for hours and still not feel
totally beat the next day that's about 60% of maximum heart rate then from that
point up we're getting into the an aerobic that means without oxygen
meaning we can't breathe fast enough to completely satisfy the body's oxygen
need so we're falling a little bit behind we can't rely on fat burning and
using oxygen we have to rely on sugar and glycolysis and there's some other
videos I've done in the past where you can check that out so between a heart
rate of 120 to 160 or 60 to 80 percent approximately we're in the an aerobic
range now we're huffing puffing and we can keep it up not for
hours but minutes we can push it and do it for 20 30 40 minutes if we have
enough willpower but it's sort of painful and and we're totally beat
afterwards if we do that and then we get into what we call high-intensity
interval training this is the all-out that give it all you got
do-or-die kind of exercise and because it's it should be so intense you can
only keep it up for seconds and if you could keep it up for minutes then you're
really more in the anaerobic range you haven't really hit the zone of high
intensity where you get some of those specific benefits so your maximum heart
rate is going to vary a little bit and typically it'll probably be somewhere
between a hundred and sixty to 220 and that's because the maximum heart rate
goes down as we age everyone's a little different but typically you're gonna
find it to be roughly 220 minus your age so I am 54 years old so if I subtract my
age from that I should have a maximum heart rate of about 166 so when I really
push myself if I do some uphill sprints or something I can still get my heart
rate to about 175 so it's a ballpark number but it'll give you a pretty good
range of where you need to be and the 220 heart rate would be basically a
teenager so if you're 60 years old shoot for 160 if you're a teenager shoot for
200 220 and that means you're in within a few percent of your maximum heart rate
so I put a hundred-plus here because myself for example can get over a
hundred percent of my theoretical maximum heart rate but once in order to
get in to hit you want to push yourself to where you're very very close to that
maximum heart rate so let's look at what's happening in the body in these
different areas in these different stages so let's look at stress level how
much stress is it to the body and we we talk about cortisol general stress level
and how much does it break the body down because we want to realize that exercise
does not build you up exercise breaks you down
it's the recovery and the proper nutrition that builds you back up so you
can do the exercise again even better so with aerobic exercise when you're
just walking leisurely when you're on a bike ride in the park then it's a very
mild stress so you're not making much cortisol and there is not much breakdown
so there's not much need for recovery or rebuilding there's no challenge you
don't have to get better really to do the bike ride next time then as we get
up we go from mild to moderate cortisol and stress and breakdown to severe to
extreme and what this means is every one of these has some benefits because the
closer we get the more extreme we get the higher the stress level which breaks
us down and that's not a great thing but it is sort of a great thing because it's
the challenge to the body so it tells the body hey you got to really really
get your act together you got to grow stronger so that you can
handle this next time because if you do this on a regular basic basis the body
quickly gets the idea that this is going to happen again and we'd better get our
act together next we look at growth hormone and this is sort of related to
what I just mentioned growth hormone is a rebuilding hormone it's a rejuvenating
hormone it's extremely powerful for anti-aging so powerful that they often
give it as an as a drug but of course when they give it as a drug you
unbalance the body because you're pushing it in from the outside when you
make it on your own you always remain in balance in your
body so the growth hormone impact on aerobic is very low you're not
challenging your body much as we go up you get some and then you get more and
at the hit level now you're making as much as three to four hundred percent
the normal amount of growth hormone and this stays up for 48 to 72 hours it
degrades gradually so even doing a HIIT workout twice a week is gonna keep you
at a pretty high level of growth hormone in a sustained way fitness now this
depends on what you're after now we're talking more about what's your goal the
fitness impact on aerobic is pretty low with anaerobic you get more and more and
once you get into hit you have a lot of fitness impact so now we have to look at
what is your goal I was an Olympic decathlete so my goal was extremely
event specific at a very very high level so that meant I had to practice at the
level and in the same way that I was going to compete because if you're if
you're a sprinter and you're gonna run the hundred meters and it's gonna last
10 seconds and you're gonna be all out you're gonna be on a hundred percent you
can't practice at 70 percent and then believe that the body is ready to go to
a hundred same thing if you're a tennis player or a rower or a mountain biker or
a triathlete you have to do some base training but then you have to gear it
toward your specific goal now let's look at what some different goals might be so
obviously if your goal is fitness if you are a triathlete then you got to figure
out how to balance this in a way to fit your event if you're a triathlete you're
gonna spend a lot of time right around the lower end of an aerobic because
you're going to be going for six seven eight hours so you can't be
up in here because you couldn't sustain it
but you also can't be down here because then you're not really getting the
fitness level that you need but let's just say someone's goal is health you
don't have any particular not going to compete you're not gonna race you just
want to be moderately fit you want to be healthy you want to maximize the growth
hormone and the all these different variables let's say it and now it also
depends on how old you are so if you're 20 or 50 or 80 years old you're probably
going to have a little bit different goals but let's say you're 20 years old
and your goal is just to be healthy then I would suggest and these are just rough
numbers it's not like I researched this and said this is exactly what you need
to do for this situation but it'll give you an idea I think of where how you can
kind of fit this together so if you're 20 years old then you probably just want
to do somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of your training in the aerobic
range meaning you're breathing slowly you're breathing fully but steadily but
you're not panting and panicking and this is tricky for a lot of people
because they think training is pain they think they have no pain no gain that
they have to hurt in order to get something out of it and that's not true
because at this level you have still doubled your heart rate you have more
than doubled your circulation because each heartbeat pumps more blood
so you're tripled or quadrupled your circulation your drainage your detox
your oxygenation of tissues all of these things are tremendously increased even
at a moderate level long before you actually feel pain or discomfort so if
you're just looking for health then do the vast majority of your time in
training in the arabic range meaning 120 or less in heartrate then you probably
want to do some if you enjoy it if you want like to
Tenace if you like to do spin classes if you like to do aerobics then do some of
that if you enjoy it do some because it's going to get you some fitness it's
moderately stressful and again this depends on how healthy you are to start
with if you're already a little bit fragile then you probably don't want to
get into this range at all if you're just trying to get started you might
spend as much as a hundred percent of your time in in this range and then I
would encourage you to still do a little bit of high-intensity training even if
you do ninety five percent down here and you do nothing here do a little bit of
high-intensity but this also has to do with how fit you
are how healthy are you if you have pain if you have knee pain or back pain or
Achilles pain you're not going to be able to do sprints so you have to adapt
it to what you're capable of doing something that's relatively safe would
be a stationary bike for example you sit down and you pedal as hard as you can
for seconds not minutes or hours thirty seconds you take a few seconds ten 20
second break you go all out again 30 seconds and you just do that until
you get your heart rate up and you do this no more than once or twice a week
if you're if you're young and fit you might do it a little bit more you might
want to do it three or four even five times if it's event-specific but the
older you get and the less event-specific you are you probably
don't want to do this more than once or twice a week for just a few minutes just
long enough to get your heart rate into that 95 to 100 percent range and now you
are dramatically increasing your growth hormone your anti-aging circumstances
and so forth so if you're 50 you might want to go somewhere between 70 to 95
percent in the aerobic range if you enjoy it do a little bit of anaerobic
and do a little bit of high intensity and even if you're 80
years old if you can you might do as anywhere from 80 to as much as a hundred
percent in this range you may do something here if you're really youthful
80 year old and you like playing tennis keep doing that or if you have some
specific hobby and do what you can if you're if you're not fit enough if you
have pain or something keeping you from it then your high intensity is going to
be zero which holds true for the 50 year olds as well but if you can try to do at
least once a week maybe twice a little bit of high intensity because now you
are challenging your body you're telling your body hey we need some growth
hormone we need something to build up the body so that it can get better
so you can get stronger so you can have more vitality and deal with this stress
tomorrow because it is very stressful that's why even though the tremendous
benefits we want to keep this to a minimum very very short duration not
every day because this is low low stress you can do as much as you like do it for
hours if you enjoy it and in the anaerobic range then you do as much as
you enjoy but don't let it become most of the training that you do because now
you're just stressing your body without really getting the health or fitness
benefits so is hit training Arabic or anaerobic well it's on the spectrum so
hit is an extreme version of anaerobic stay tuned to our channel so you can
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