Get Your HIIT

I think that we can all appreciate the importance of keeping our players fit and healthy. One means of achieving this in our athletes is through the maintenance of a stable and constant training stimulus. As most of us now realize, when we see large spikes in training load, and especially the high-speed running (HSR) component, we often see injuries.

Soccer, Ice Hockey and American Football – three sports that can benefit from High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and all included in Martin and Paul’s book and course on the Science and Application of HIIT. They are also three sports that I have had the privilege to work in.

Regardless of your chosen sport, knowing how to implement high-intensity interval training (HIIT) within any S&C program should be a non-negotiable skill to have in your wheelhouse for so many reasons. The benefits are well established, and HIIT can be catered to stimulate the precise physiological (and psychological) responses needed to enhance our athlete’s capacities. Yet, to make the most out of HIIT, we need to have a clear rationale as to why and when we use it.

If you asked me: “Do we need AI to be better sport scientists?” I might retort by asking you in return: “Did we need electric guitars to make better music?”

Successful entrepreneurs often tout the importance that daily morning rituals make to achieving their exceptional outcomes [1]. Those routines, conducted from 4 to 6am every morning for example, are claimed to reduce stress levels, make them happier as well as more productive. Rituals may include fasted exercise in their own home-based gym, meditation, self-reflection and day planning, topped off with a special diet or supplement. Since such morning habits are reportedly used by highly successful people, the ‘best practice’ approach suggests that embracing those should help others to become successful too. An alternative way to approach the question however, may be to ask whether having morning routines is in fact the chicken or the egg? Put differently, maybe it’s not the routines that make people successful, but rather that their success allows them to have the liberty and opportunity to have such routines? Put another way – are such routines enabled because you already make a few million each year, and have a bunch of people running your business for you?

When I started working in competitive surfing in the capacity of sport scientist/S&C coach, curiosity was a helpful emotion to bring to work each day. There were a few resources offering opinions on training for surfing; some studies of injury incidence, severity, and location, and roughly 4 or 5 great studies that examined the activities involved in surfing (time motion analysis of recreational surfing and competitive heats). These resources, along with my personal experience as a surfer, was a great place to start. It was such a fun opportunity to jump into a sport that I loved (I began surfing in 1994) and begin to grow my practise in the area, in what you might call a relatively clean slate. And with that context, I rolled up my sleeves and tried to take the following philosophy to work every day: “curiosity and an open mind are wonderful allies”.

I was privileged to speak at two conferences this past weekend, to two distinct audiences about HIIT Science. The first was the CSEP conference in Niagara Falls for the Gord Sleivert memorial address; the audience consisting largely of university professors and postgraduate students.

As an applied physiologist and past rowing coach, that was my question. Recommendations typically encourage the separation of high-intensity interval training (HIIT) sessions by at least 48 h. But given there are so many ways to skin the cat with HIIT, and so many HIIT weapons (formats) and physiological target types, is it fair to think that each is going to require the same length of recovery time following?

Sport Science has evolved into a field of many sub-disciplines. These have been broken down into very specific roles at the elite level of sport, with the overarching aim of enhancing performance and reducing the risk of injury to athletes. However, I feel that we sometimes get lost across this continuum of performance and injury prevention; a term I believe sets us up for failure. Can we really prevent all injuries from occurring?

Coaches and practitioner in both team and individual sports aim to individualize the intensity of both low and high-intensity interval (HIIT) training. In endurance sports, exercise intensity during HIIT is traditionally prescribed using a percentage/proportion of determined thresholds (i.e. lactate/ventilatory thresholds, critical power/speed, functional threshold power) or maximal aerobic power output/speed.

Recently a narrative has emerged surrounding sports science as being over-protective. Stories from high-profile former players tell of sports scientists reining them in, and risking the robustness of future generations: “All of a sudden you start drilling someone in training, and a sports science bloke pops over: ‘Woah, woah, woah, he’s in the red.”

How many times have you heard this? Let’s add HIIT to make us feel better? It’s not uncommon. HIIT is popular, but in fact, its popularity resides more amongst the scientists. Coaches are more conservative, and fear the implementation of HIIT, at least as it is described in scientific papers.