Is It Ok to Do HIIT Workouts 5 Times a Week?

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To do HIIT workouts five times a week? This is JJ Virgin, four time New York Times bestselling author, celebrity nutrition expert, and Fitness hall of Famer. I've been on on a lifelong quest for answers to the toughest health questions, and now I'm sharing what I found with you. Welcome to Ask the Health Expert. Ann Elizabeth from Facebook asks, I like HIIT workouts. Is it okay to do them four to five times a week, or is this too much? I also do strength training, but I love HIIT aerobic dance. Hey Ann, I've got some intel on this. I'll be right back with the answer.

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All right, so first of all, let's define hiit. So if you're going, what the heck's a hiit workout? Well, HIIT workout stands for high intensity interval training. In my camp, I call it bursting to blast fat. It is where you go all out for 30 to 60 seconds. I'm talking all out as hard as you can, and then you have to recover because you can't keep going. And you actively recover for, you know, twice as long. And then you do it again and you repeat it to accumulate four to eight minutes of total bursts. And one of the things I tell people is if you can do more, if you go, oh, you know what? I did a minute of hard bursting and I felt like I'd go another straight minute. And I say, you got to burst harder there. So really, you want to think of 30 to 60 or even 20 to 60 seconds. And if it gets, if you feel like you can keep going, that's not a burst, my friend. You gotta go harder. All right? It should never get easier. You just keep getting stronger. It's kind of a good motto for life, isn't it? All right, so that's the first thing that is what high intensity interval training is. My mantra again is burst to blast fat. So my first question is, are you really doing hiit? Aerobic dance? That's the first thing thing. Because here's one of the mantras I talk about with exercises. Exercise is a drug. And it is like an amazing drug. Incredible. For your brain, for your bones, for your heart, for your mood, for burning fat, for getting rid of toxins. If it was a drug, every single person would prescribe it. I mean, a prescription drug, it is a drug. But just like that, you want to do the right amount of the right things. The right amount's therapeutic. Not enough or too much can be destructive. So let me give you a couple things to think about here. And this comes from my fast fitness program where I talk about my core four. And they are this number one, moving more. This is something that you're doing like walking the dog, I say as I'm looking over at my dog, who's lying like a lazy thing on the chair. But walking the dog, doing easy things that you could do for 30 to 60 minutes, easily talking to a friend. And you want to do more of this all throughout the day, right? Those are those activities of Daily living, you want to move more. But this, this does not count as exercise. It all counts, but it doesn't count as exercise because in order for it to count as exercise, you have to get hot, sweaty, and it should hurt a little bit, just like it does when you burst train. So the next thing is burst style training, just like I explained. And you could do that with dancing, you could do that with sprinting, you could do that with stair climbing, you could do that with swimming. So anything that really involves your full body, that you can do all out for 20 to 60 seconds and then recover for twice as long actively and repeat. In fact, my favorite thing to do is use something called the exciser, and that is in my home gym, it's kept me, kept me sane during the quarantine. The quarantine, the COVID quarantine. So I recommend doing this for four to eight total minutes, three times a week. Now, can you do more? Yes, you can. But here's the thing. You want to make sure that you're also giving your body adequate time for recovery. I'm going to talk more about that, but I'm going to finish on my core four, because I kind of went sideways. I let the add kick in. So there's low intensity moving more. There's burst training, which is the HIIT training, and then resistance training, which you could use weights or your body weight, but that is where you are doing things to build muscle. Burst training is great because it teaches your body how to handle stress better. It helps your body burn off fat, it helps raise growth hormone without really taking a hit to the immune system. That if you were doing, you know, like moderate to moderately high intensity for extended period, could do. Resistance training is really helping you become more insulin sensitive, helping you have more muscle that boosts your metabolism. It's great for your bones, it's great for your physique. You'll look better naked. I said it. So I like you to do each body part at least twice a week, multiple exercises, multiple sets. And when I say a body part, I think of upper body pushing that involves your chest and shoulders and triceps. Upper body pulling that involves your lats and your biceps and your rear shoulders, hips and thighs. That's your glutes and your quads and your inner and outer thighs and your calves and then power core. And that is really, that's your glutes too, and it's your low back and abdominals. And I like to hit each body part multiple exercises twice a week with 48 hours of rest in between. So this is the real oh, and then the final one that usually gets dumped. I've been way better about this. And that's something restorative. Now here's where something like yoga could go into. As you can tell, you could do like a tabata yoga and that would be first or hiit training. You could do a more difficult yoga and that would fall into resistance training. Or you could do a restorative flow yoga and that could be falling into the restorative. Because just as important as to get good quality workout and the intensity, you also need to have good recovery. Now when you say you love the aerobic dance, I bet you're a little addicted to the endorphins. But you can get that from the weight training, the resistance training, you can get it from the burst training. So it's much better to mix it up. It will help you avoid an overuse injury of a specific thing. And you really want to look at this and judge your soreness and recovery. One of the ways you can do this is look at your resting heart rate. Get used to where it is. Ideally, as you get fitter, you recover faster in between your bursts, but your resting heart rate downshifts because your heart becomes more efficient. If you see that starting to rise up, that's a sign of over training. So listen to your body. Just because you have a workout scheduled for the day, if all of a sudden your body is like going, knock it off, white flag, I'm done, I'm too sore. Listen to it in soreness around a joint site, soreness to touch, soreness that lasts more than a day or two, give it a rest, right? And that will mean, hey, maybe do a sauna, maybe do some restorative yoga or go for an easy walk. Mix it up. Super duper important. Keep your body guessing. And one of the important other things for restoring yourself is good quality sleep. And you knew I'd have to get that in. So good quality sleep important too. So the answer is, I'd love to see you mixing it up. Judge it for yourself, see how your body's doing. But think about getting all of the core four in. This is Jill JJ with Ask the Health Expert. I do this five times a week, so make sure you never miss a show by going to subscribetojay.com.

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