Is HIIT Just Another Fad?

High Intensity Interval training has been around for a very long time in one way or another and has been used by coaches to train many professional athletes.

However, in the past five years, high intensity interval training has become more of a mainstream way of training for people with the overall goal of health. Is this a good thing, or is it destined to go the way of so many other fitness fads from the past?
High intensity interval training started to become more and more popular in the wake of functional training. When people used to spend more time pumping up their muscles than building full body strength, cardio had to be done on a treadmill, stationary bike or stairclimber. This meant that many people would spend two hours in the gym or make two visits a day just to get the workout they should be getting in less than half the time. Cardio would usually be looked at as a chore, spending sixty minutes watching a digital readout tell you how hard you are working isn’t much fun.

When functional fitness started to become more and more popular, people quickly realized that there are many benefits to this kind of training such as using more of your mind, creating flexibility, building muscle and driving your heart rate up more quickly than the cardio equipment was able to do. It wasn’t long before people started ditching the cardio machines to get their heart rate up using full body exercise. The benefits are numerous, the idea of doing so much more while using less equipment and spending less money is a big one. More results in less time keeps people coming back and yes, it is much more enjoyable.
I believe interval training is here to stay, as is the era of functional exercise and the paleo/primal diet. These are all concepts that have taken us back in time to doing what we should have been doing all along. We lost this knowledge somewhere along the line, partially due to the fitness and health industry being over run by greed. There isn’t a lot of money in a dumbbell, kettlebell or barbell that doesn’t cost much and never wears out, and even less in teaching someone to do bodyweight training. But the ocean of mostly useless equipment adorning the floors of most gyms cost hundreds of thousands of dollars even for a modest selection.

People who became members of gyms in search of greater health simply followed what they assumed was expert advice and used these machines. They even bought into the brightly packaged array of non-foods sold in gyms as yet another artificial means of achieving health. The expert advice they followed was from financial experts, not health experts.
With the popularization of big bang exercises that use many big muscles in a single movement, cardio has taken on a new form. There are countless ways you can make interval training work for you. Science seems to back this methodology across the board too. It has been proven that high intensity interval training not only allows you to burn more calories, but also increases your Vo2 max more effectively than endurance training does. In addition, HIIT training is usually easier on the joints, because there is far less time spent with high impact, and doesn’t put you into a sympathetic nervous system dominance like long bouts of cardio.
I think that the increase in the number of people doing HIIT is a bi product of the progress we have made in recent years in understanding and implementing function in exercise. I don’t think it will be long before the mainstream gyms replace the machinery crowding the floors with more simple solutions. As more and more people opt for free weights and body weights the expensive and highly specialized equipment will become less cost effective. Is HIIT a fad? No, but I think it did help expose the fitness fad of expensive machines and artificial exercise.

What are your thoughts on HIIT training?