Get Your HIIT

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.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for some time. I love our field of applied sport science. Having been part of it for some time now, one thing I’ve noticed is how many of us stem from a solid background in sport – one where we never quite reached the top. My buddy, Dan Plews, likes to refer to guys like this, like me, as your stock standard ‘semi-pro’.

The sport science industry has come a long way from the days of manually coding matches using a pen and paper, and the recent influx of technologies such as global positioning systems (GPS) and accelerometers have allowed us to be far more objective with our decision-making processes.

As an immediate follow-up to the ‘context’ post, I wish to use this quote from the agnostic Robert G. Ingersoll as a stepping point for further comment on the importance of pragmatism when it comes to making decisions in the high-performance setting.

To open this blog post series, I thought I might start by discussing some of aspects that are often overlooked in sport science and coaching courses with respect to daily life in the trenches of elite sport. Most people who have worked in the elite performance setting for more than a few years would agree, that what makes them successful (or not) often has little to do with what they learned at school.

Greetings fellow high-intensity interval training (HIIT) enthusiasts, and welcome to our blog, aptly named: “Get your HIIT”. Here, we will bring you content related to the science and application of HIIT, the central theme of HIIT Science.