Do you know how your body will have to recuperate from HIIT workout or even simply just the number of days in between that you need to provide it? In this article, I will address what exactly is happening in our body when we do HIIT and how your body recovers from HIIT during those off days as well as what you should be doing in between those recovery days to get the most out of a high-intensity workout. So let’s get started.
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High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) Explained
Let’s recap what HIIT is. HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training) is a type of cardiovascular exercise that involves short intervals of intense activity followed by rest or less intense exercise. This form of training is developed in order to help an individual achieve improvements in their fitness levels much quicker, and as a result is one of the most popular training methods for improving health and fitness. This can involve 20–30 seconds of an intense activity, such as sprinting or high-intensity cycling, which is then followed by a recovery period lasting 10–30 seconds where you perform the same activity at a very low level.
Cardiovascular Health — This is one of the main reasons why HIIT has become so popular. The short bursts of intense activity tax the cardiovascular system and make it stronger, improving heart and lung function. One of its best benefits is that HIIT effectively burns calories not just during the workout, but even after you leave the gym. After a workout, the body’s demand for oxygen is higher, which causes it to have an “afterburn effect” and burn calories all day. Also, HIIT can promote muscle toning since the high intensity is usually due to body resistance exercises.
HIIT is pretty physiologically demanding. Your body is taken up to its maximal effort during the high-intensity phases, which means you’re using a combination of both your aerobic and anaerobic energy systems when exercising. The combination of desiring to do two things at once causes you to expend more energy and ultimately having your muscles go slack. The high-intensity factor means you are placing a heavy demand on your muscles and heart, which makes taking proper recovery time that much more important. Overtraining is a result of improper recovery, which leads to decreased performance, a much higher likelihood of getting injured, and muscle soreness that lasts for days.
If you understand the composition and benefits of HIIT, it will give you a better appreciation for recovery. By employing proper recovery methods the body is able to repair, rebuild itself, and allows for more constant performance improvements, as well as long-term fitness enhancements.
What Happens to Your Body Post-HIIT: The Recovery Process
1. Muscle Repair and Growth
In fact, when done correctly High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) sets in motion a series of complex physiological processes which are pro-recovery and vital for improvements in athletic performance. Following a HIIT workout here is microscopic damage occurring within your muscles, which is part of the natural process of building strength and endurance. The body starts to repair muscle fiber. When you exercise harder, the muscle fibers are traumatized (small injuries to be fixed before they can heal up stronger and more resilient) This recovery process relies on the synthesis of protein, which utilizes amino acids for repairing and building muscle tissue.
2. Glycogen Replenishment
Nutrients are one of the massively important things that you should take good care on when in recovery. Since the glycogen stores are likely to be depleted after your vigorous HIIT workout, you need some carbohydrates post-workout. After the workout your body replenishes glycogen stores so that you have energy to perform well in the next workout. Glycogen likewise works as the energy for muscular tissues during high-intensity exercises. Equally as important is your protein intake since this provides the building blocks to repair and grow muscle. Eating a protein rich, high carb snack or meal with about 30 minutes to an hour post exercise can help optimize recovery and improve performance.
3. Reducing Inflammation
When you exercise heavily, your muscles and joints become inflamed. Post-HIIT, it also helps to manage muscle soreness, a phenomenon known as delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), most of the time. This soreness is due to minuscule tears in the muscle fibers and inflammation. The body repairs these micro-tears naturally, resulting in less pain and helping to enhance the performance muscle experience later. Eating anti-inflammatory foods, getting enough fluids and rest will help as well.
4. Hormonal Balance
A major issue of the recovery process is hormonal balance. High intensity interval training (HIIT) will alter some of the most important hormones in your body… including cortisol and human growth hormone (HGH). Exercise and release cortisol -cortisol, the stress hormone, transiently increases when we are working out but should come back down to a normal level during recovery. In contrast, tissue repair and muscle growth are the primary functions of HGH. Correct recovery ensures a natural balancer of these hormones which are crucial to physical fitness in general.
5. Neuromuscular Recovery
Extreme fatiguing the nervous system from a HIIT workout. Effective recovery needs to be performed sleep and hydration are an absolute must. Sleep is a time when the body can heal tissues, synthesize proteins and replenish energy stores. Helps with the transport of nutrients and removing waste from muscles. By making sure to take in the proper amount of fluids as well as maintaining good sleep hygiene, you can significantly increase how much faster and better you will recover for the next workout so that your neuromuscular system can revamp itself again giving a much improved coordination/reflex reactions times/performance during follow up workouts.
What is it: Ideal time between HIIT sessions
It is indeed a great way of enhancing cardiovascular capacity and burning calories in HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training). But what about recovery, how long should one wait to do the next HIIT session to enjoy its full benefits. In general, most professionals recommend resting between 48 to 72 hours, depending on the type of muscle and how it should be in order to regain its former performance. It is during this window you need to recover those muscle fibers, replace your stores of energy and stop any injuries building up. Note: The recovery time can vary from person to person.
General Recovery Guidelines
For Beginners: You may be new to this type of workout format and your body needs more than a day for recovering. After your first few sessions you may feel a bit of muscle soreness and fatigue, this is normal. For beginners, it may be a good idea to take a 2-3 day rest between HIIT workouts in order to adequately recover.
Intermediate-Advanced: To those that are more trained with HIIT will find 1-2 days of rest in between sessions is enough. As your body becomes more accustomed to HIIT, your body will be able to recover faster from the stresses of HIIT.
Intensity and time: Recovery times are largely determined by how long you exercise and how intense those workouts are. It depends on how intense and long the session is. You may require a few extra days to recover based on the intensity and length of the workout. So, if you do 20 minutes of HIIT at your best effort, you may need a full 48 hours of recovery time.
Listening to Your Body
It’s important to recognize when your body has signs of overtraining. Your body will have symptoms like prolonged body aches, feeling tired all the time, your performance worsening, and even your personality may change are all signs indicating that your body doesn’t have enough rest. This will increase your chance to get injured or burnout if you keep working out.
RECOVERY: A Variety of Strategies and Activities
Active Recovery
The intensity of HIIT workouts is also another factor that impacts how soon one can recover. Doing high maybe followed by moderate intensity sessions allow the muscles to have a more chilled workout, and will recover faster. Furthermore, the active recovery practice carries more blood to muscles and provides them with faster regeneration without overwhelming the organism.
Try some of these active recovery on your rest days:
Light cardio:
Maximizing the recovery time in between high-intensity interval training (HIIT) is important and these tactics or activities can help you recover better. Low-level exercises that do not strain your muscles, such as jogging or cycling, help improve blood circulation. This process will help the removal of waste metabolites and nutrient delivery to tired muscles in order to speed up recovery.
Stretching, yoga: Keeps the joints supple and reduces muscle tension.
If you are being active, like doing some light exercise as mentioned above, you should also add these exercises. Include stretching in at least one part of your recovery routine. The bottom line is the flexibility (dynamic and static stretching), which allows your muscles to be less stiff and easier to avoid injury.
Foam rolling: It’s a performance tool to help release muscle knots and improve blood flow. Helps to release muscle knots and improve blood flow.
Another good thing to do is foam rolling (or self-myofascial release). Foam rolling creates localized pressure to massage out muscle tightness, and increase range of motion. Massage therapy works in much the same way to relieve muscle soreness and improve muscle function.
At the end of the day, if you want to have a successful recovery from HIIT it comes down to matching your workout intensity with proper rest periods. One can further maximize performance and maintain long-term fitness gains by listening to the body and adjusting recovery times accordingly.
Nutrition
Nutrition is critical to wound healing. Spelling that out, it reads muscle repair and energy replenishment. To do this, you will need to eat a balanced diet full of proteins, carbs and fats. Protein Especially important because this provides the amino acids that your body uses to rebuild muscle! Instead, carbohydrates are used to restore glycogen in the body after intense workouts and fats support your cells overall function as well as decreasing inflammation.
Mental Relaxation
Do not forget to include things such as mental relaxation techniques in a recovery program. No one can deny that practicing mindfulness helps a lot in alleviating stress and maintaining a healthy mind. This is important because stress hinders the physical recovery process. Including a regular meditation practice as a part of your routine can improve total recovery and enhance subsequent HIIT performance.
When implemented, these recovery strategies and activities can help speed up this process and allow your body to recover better between HIIT sessions, which in turn will also allow you to perform better at them leading to reduced injury risk.
Conclusion
Most people generally require 1–2 days to recover from a HIIT exercise, however this will fluctuate based on elements and how onerous your workout was. Listen to your body and adjust your recovery time as needed!!! Recovery is a must to avoid any injuries and it will also help you in getting effective results from your HIIT sessions.
