Just As Well, The Women's Health Podcast - Why You’re Probably Doing HIIT Wrong + How To Maximise Its Benefits

Episode Date: May 11, 2021

You’ll likely know well the multiple fitness benefits of incorporating high intensity interval training - better known as HIIT - into your workout regime. There's the improved cardio-respiratory health boosted fat burn, as well as the fact this most intense and sweaty of exercise need only last a short while. It’s these perks - and that it requires next to no equipment, and minimal amounts of space - that have drawn so many of you to HIIT during the pandemic as you keep fit from the confines of bedrooms and gardens bedrooms and gardens. But, as the gyms draw us back with their wide range of classes and shiny weights areas, is it time to reconsider? Because - as you’ll learn - there can be too much of a good thing. In today’s episode, our digital fitness writer Morgan Fargo speaks to Luke Worthington, a personal trainer and sports scientist, as well as personal trainer and three-time WH cover star Alice Liveing, about how to find that all important healthy balance and fun when it comes to workouts. They discuss what HIIT is, as well as what people commonly get wrong - including that if you’re going too hard, for too long, it will not only place you at increased risk of injury but may also sabotage your body composition goals. Listen to find out how to do HIIT right in your exercise schedule, so that it works well for you. Because as Alice and Luke both say, fitness should be something that has a positive impact on your emotional wellbeing - that makes you feel really good.   Join Alice Liveing on Instagram: @aliceliveing Join Luke Worthington on Instagram: @lukewtraining Join Morgan Fargo on Instagram: @morganfargo Join Women's Health UK on Instagram: @womenshealthuk   Like what you’re hearing? We'd love if you could rate and leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, as it really helps other people find the show. Also, remember to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, so you’ll never miss an episode.   Got a goal in mind? Shoot us a message on Instagram putting ‘Going for Goal’ at the start of your message and our experts could be helping you achieve your health goal in an upcoming episode. Alternatively, you can email us: [e-mail] Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Long before the acronyms WFH and HGS entered our pandemic vocab, that's Working from Home and Hot Girl Summer, FYI. There was another that had long been rolling off tongues in gym changing rooms, Instagram feeds, and the Women's Health Office, H-I-I-T, aka Hit. Now you'll likely know well the multiple fitness benefit of incorporating high-intensity interval training into your workout regime. from improved cardio-respatory health to boosted fat burn. And then there's the fact that this most intense and sweaty of exercise sessions need only last a short while, perfect for the busiest of lifestyles. It's these perks that have drawn so many of you to hit over the past year and a bit. Requiring next to no equipment and minimal amounts of space,

it's understandably become a way that we're able to stay fit within the confines of living rooms, bedrooms, bedrooms and gardens. But as gyms draw us back with their wide range of classes and shiny weights areas, is it time to reconsider putting all our training eggs in the metaphorical hit basket? Because, as you'll learn in today's show, there can be too much for a good thing. Hello, I'm Rochene Derbyshokane and this is Going for Goal, the weekly Women's Health podcast. On this show, we chat to our favourite celebrities and wellness heavyweights about what they do to feel and function at their best. And on episodes like this one, we call on top experts to share

their best advice for helping you make good on the health goals that really matter to you. Now, before we get into today's episode, we want to tell you about one of the Going for Girl podcast team's favourite fellow wellness podcasts, The Emma Guns Show. It's hosted by experienced beauty and health journalist Emma Guns. She has nearly 20 years experience interviewing celebrities and experts for national newspapers and magazines, including our very own women's health. Now, on her fantastic podcast, the Emma Guns show, she covers a broad range of topics, including physical, mental health, beauty, careers and lifestyle, all linked by the common themes of life and well-being. The show combines personal experience with engaging

and entertaining interviews with credible world-leading experts who are coaxed to convey their knowledge in a comprehensible fashion. So far, she has featured Wim Hof, Andy Pudocum from Headspace, Gillian Michaels, Alice Living, Elizabeth Hurley and many, many more. We highly recommend giving it a listen. Right, back to today's episode. Within it, our digital fitness writer Morgan Fargo speaks to two leading voices on the topic of hit and how to find that all-important healthy balance and fun when it comes to workouts. Now, you may notice that Morgan's mic wasn't working properly, apologies for the slightly dodgy sound. Her guests are Luke Worthington, a personal trainer and sports scientist, along with three times Women's Health cover star and

P.T. Alice Living. They discuss what hit is in its truest form and how that differs from the high intensity training we've come to know. Before moving on, most crucially, to what people commonly get wrong, because, as you'll learn, if you're going too hard for too long, it will not only place you at increased risk of injury, but may also actually sabotage your body composition goals. Listen on to find out how to do hit right so that it works well for you, your goals and your weekly workout schedule. Because, as Alice, Luce and Morgan all say, fitness should be something that has a positive impact on your emotional well-being, something that makes you feel really, really good. Over to Morgan. Alice, Luke, I'm so excited to have you on the Women's Health

podcast. You are both just such huge icons in the industry and I think it's going to be a really, really fantastic episode. So thank you. Let's kick off with actually getting to grips about what HIP is and should be. Alice, can you give us the rundown? Yeah, well, it's a tricky one, isn't it? Because what we've grown to know as high intensity training isn't necessarily what the research really dictates when it comes to the true style of hit training that people would know in a lab. So I think, you know, the average person's perspective of what hit would be would probably be something around body weight, high intensity training, maybe. it's stuff that has plyometric work in it, the stuff that gets you really sweaty, basically.

And usually it's in like an interval format. So it would be, you know, maybe 30 seconds off, 10 seconds on, sorry, 10 seconds off. Lots of jumping, lots of sweating and hopefully working quite hard. And I think that's fine. And that's obviously a type of training. Whether that's true high intensity training is obviously another argument and something that I'm sure we're going to get. do and discuss. But I think that it's been become more of a fashionable way of training, shall we say, over the last couple of years, because it's time efficient, you know, for the amount of time that you're working, the energy burn can be greater than, you know, spending an hour of training in the gym. And that's often, you know, if people's goal is to get fit and perhaps lose some body fat, that's what they're really looking for. And it can provide

good results. You know, we know that any stimulus that elicits kind of an energy burn helps to create, you know, an energy deficit which can help towards fat loss. And so a lot of people will attribute their successes in that sense to hit, whether the hit was actually responsible for the fat loss is obviously, again, another conversation that we can have. But yeah, I think it definitely has become really trendy and I can absolutely see that for a lot of people it's something that they really enjoy you know it gets them that that feeling of you know endorphins post-workout they feel great and and like I said it's great for those who don't want to be exercising for prolonged periods of time they want short sharp workouts and and for that yeah hit is obviously something that they

tend to gravitate towards you mentioned hit in a lab setting would be very different to what hit might be if people are doing it at home what is it in its truest form as people people in a lab would want it to be in the perfect conditions? Well, most of the research on high-intensity training is done either on a static bike or with track sprints. So a lot of the purported benefits of high-intensity training, that's not all the research. There's like a tiny piece of research about body weight hit training, but the majority of it is done on a static bike or in track sprint. So really it's about much, much shorter intensities. So, you know, working for a match for a match,

of maybe like four minutes where you go all out and it's like 90% of your max, if not more, followed by, you know, a longer rest period. And so I think that's very, very different to jumping up and down and, you know, doing like star jumps and burpees. For the average person, it's probably a bit less enticing to sit on a static watt bike or to head to a track to do sprints than it is, you know, it's much more accessible for them to do the sort of jumping up and down in terms of it's, you know, it's much easier for them to just roll out and do that in the living room than to head to a track or to sit on a walk bike. But yeah, that would be, and I'm sure Luke can add something to that, but that would be what I would say are that the main differences,

really. Absolutely. And Luke, what are some of the common mistakes you see people making with are the sessions too long? Are they not what they should be? What do you see? I think, well, the answer is yes to both of those, actually. So yes, yes, too long. And and yes, not quite as, not quite what it says on the tin, if you like. And just to add to Alice's point, if we, if we look back to where it actually came from, it was a study, it was a Japanese study. So it was a professor Tabata, which is where the Tabata thing came from as well. And he put this study together where he was testing elite cyclists.

So he was testing elite cyclists who performed steady state, and so like a constant pace for 60 minutes versus cyclone. who were performing at 170% of VO2 max for 20 seconds and resting for 10 seconds. And so if we imagine what 100% feels like, which is exhaustion, he was pushing these people to 170%. So it's a lot, basically. So a very, very high level of exertion and then complete rest. And they perform these intervals for seven minutes. And his results showed that that work group burned more energy than the other work group. And of course, if you just look at the top line and say,

well, work for seven minutes and burn more energy than working for an hour, it sounds super appealing. It sounds very, very appealing. But just to say to just about to what Alice is saying, that level of intensity is very unlikely to be achieved doing your jumping jacks and doing your mountain climates. It's just not. When you're not going to work at 170%, that doesn't mean that jumping jacks and your mountain climbers

becomes redundant. It doesn't at all because you're moving rather than not moving. But I think that we have to just be clear about what things are and what they're not. And if we're presenting hit as being, I guess, a silver bullet and say, look, do this and you will magically burn more energy, achieve all your fitness goals and the next one said, then that's, I think that's not correct. If what we're doing, say, do this because it's fun and it's quite easy to both to teach and to learn. So therefore, it's very accessible. It's over the last year, certainly, it's something that trends very well to online because it's a case of copy what you see. So it's something that has allowed people to exercise when gyms are closed and sports are not allowed and so forth.

But I think we just have to be clear about what it is and what it is not. What it is is a very accessible form of exercise. What it is not is this magical tool to achieve all of your fitness goals in seven minutes. That would be a responsible to claim that. That's a really good point. And I think it's really important caveat this whole podcast was saying, like at no point am I saying that someone who says they really enjoy high intensity training. I'm going to turn around and say, well, I don't think you should be doing that. You know, that's absolutely not the case. And I think, you know, Luke's absolutely right. If someone is moving and enjoying the way you they move, great. Like, forget the science, forget everything, because if you're doing it,

it's great. I think sometimes that the issue that I have around here is really more around the narrative around it. And as Luke said, it's less about the actual style of exercise. It's more just the conversation and the way that we discuss that type of exercise, even the name of it, high intensity interval training. It's very sexy. It's like a real buzzword. And it really draws people in. But really, you know, and actually this is a conversation I was having recently, if we call it what it is, which is essentially body weight interval training, it's not as sexy. It doesn't have the same draw, but essentially that is what you're doing. And absolutely, like Luke said, you know, I would absolutely want someone to move in whatever way they enjoy.

But I think it's more about let's call it what it is and let's also stop focusing on the extreme calorie burn and more on what that exercise. size is doing for that person beyond that because that's the important stuff. I mean just on that as well. If through the marketing spiel that surrounds hit, it tends to be about this calorie burn because that was what the study produced. That was what Tabata's a study produced to say more energy was burned in this workout than in this workout. So therefore, this sort of the, and that's a very easy thing to sell to say, well, do

this and you'll burn more calories, therefore you lose more weight. And then people can rationalise with that maths. but unfortunately it's not quite that straightforward in that our planned exercise only accounts for about 10% of our daily energy burn. So what we do for our workouts basically is much less important than what we do for the other 23 hours and 15 minutes of our day. So if we're thinking you do this as a weight loss tool, whatever the workout is, whether it's hit or whether it's less or whether it's whatever.

that's probably not the way we should be presenting it because, well, not probably, it isn't. Because regardless of the calorie burn that people are achieving, it's not as significant enough proportion of their daily energy expenditure to really make that much of a difference. So whatever form of exercise somebody chooses should be more about the other things they're getting from it than the calorie burn. So if we, I think there's a big reframing conversation needs to happen really, which is probably, I guess, one of the purposes of this conversation. is if we view exercise purely as a way of burning fuel and burning calories,

we're just missing the point. Because firstly, it's not a big enough proportion of our daily calorie burden to really make that much of a difference. But secondly, there is so much more to it than that. If we always describe it to clients as to say that whatever we do, we benefit in one of the five categories of fitness, being muscular strength, being aerobic fitness, being mobility, motion control, body composition, emotional well-being. They're all equally as important. So your hit class, which you could also say

circuit class, boot camp class, whatever, saying that category, might absolutely help you improve your aerobic fitness. It might absolutely help you improve your emotional well-being if you're, you know, you're getting out of the house and you're doing something, hopefully soon with lots of other people around. That's great. And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing. But it's not, you know, it's not being this sort of silver bullet that's attacking everything all at once. So when we, I think, start to look at exercise and our planned exercise as being for other things other than just burning calories, we get so much more out of it. The calorie balance is important. If weight loss is a goal, and it's a very valid goal, you know, we're in the middle of a global

health crisis where, you know, body composition has been shown to be a major, major issue. and the countries that have got issues or epidemics of poor body composition are the ones who've been hit the hardest. So we can't, I think, ignore, I'm going to say fat loss rather than weight loss because there's a difference. As a valid exercise goal, or a valid health and fitness goal, it absolutely is a valid goal. And we shouldn't demonize that. But our choice of exercise shouldn't be focused solely on that. Our lifestyle needs to be focused on that. And our exercise should be focused on the holistic benefit of exercise.

that's probably a long-winded answer. Absolutely. No, an incredibly detailed answer, which is exactly what we love. I think the thing that you said, there were two things. So number one about the original Tabata study, people were being pushed to 170%

of their maximum output, which is obviously humongous and probably not feasible if you're doing burpees in your living room. I know it's not for me. But that type of exercise is a stress on your body, and we all lead,

inherently stressful lives, whether it's emotional stress or lifestyle stress or work stress. And I really wanted to know a bit more about how hit can sometimes be an added stressor on top of an already, perhaps overloaded nervous system. Alice, can you kick us off? Yeah, absolutely. I think that, you know, one of the bug bears that I've had with the fitness in the industry is, is there's this perception that more is always better and we should be doing more. and particularly as Luke referenced, if the goal is fat loss, people often start to see that as being what they want to achieve. So the quicker they can get there, the more they need to do. So they kind of overload themselves with maybe training, you know, six days a week or multiple times a day or whatever that looks like for someone.

And we will all have different thresholds which we're able to work at. We know that exercise is a good stress. And as with most things, you can have too much of a good thing. I think that too much stress on the body, which can come from multiple sources that doesn't just have to be exercised, but it can just tip you over that balance. So when we look at things like, and it's often described as over training, but in reality, we actually recognise it more as under recovering. And that's really what it is. The body isn't able to fully recover in between training sessions or whatever you're doing in order to get back to that maintenance point. So what we see then happen is a cascade of effects which, which, you know, can, and like I said, I think it's really important that we, that we really mention that everyone's threshold at which this happens is going to be different. You have like a 20 year old girl who is fit and healthy and young and she might have a different threshold at which she can train to someone who might be slightly older than that. And so like I said, everyone's going to have a different point at which they are able to recover. But what happens

once you tip over that point and your body falls into that state of having too much stress. And yeah, like you said, stress doesn't just come from exercise. That could be that, you know, the 20-year-old girl is no kids, no stressful job. She lives at home. You know, there aren't many stresses on her. But compare that to like a 35-year-old mom who's got a high-stress job. She's got two kids. She's sleep deprived.

You know, the stresses are very different. And so, yeah, we can see exercise as being almost that thing that can push you into that point of having too much stress, in which case your sleep can be affected, your ability to, you know, your cognitive function, your mood. And then on a more serious level, things like your immune function, so if you're constantly getting colds or getting ill, your menstrual cycle can be affected. So your hormones start to be affected. And things like, you know, stress fractures and injuries will become much more common. So there's really like, I guess, a spectrum of things that can happen. But all of these are,

signs that the body just isn't able to recover in the way that it probably should be. And it's kind of a sign saying, I'm under stress and I need a little bit of a break. And the thing with high intensity training that I think is important is that on that higher end of the spectrum, like higher stress end of the spectrum. So it's something that is going to be constantly hammering your central nervous system. And the ability to recover from that just takes that little bit longer. So it's really about just being mindful of the amount of stress you have on your body, understanding and knowing the signs of under recovering, and then being able to be responsive to that within your lifestyle. And we were talking earlier about how a lot of people

are using HIT because some of their health and wellness goals are to lose fat and reach a body composition that's healthy for them and their height and their lifestyle. With the impact HIT can have on hormones, can it ever impede people's ability to lose fat because they're their bodies are under too much stress. Luke? Yes, it can. I would say it's probably to get to the point, to do enough hits workouts or, you know,

using the term, what we're describing as being hit workouts, to have that effect. There are probably other things that you're going to go wrong first. I think that you're probably more at risk of hurting yourself first before you get to that point. So therefore, yes, because consistency is going to be the most important factor in achieving any health and fitness goal,

but particularly a body composition goal rather than a weight loss goal. If we think about what improve, I mean you say body composition rather than weight. So improving body composition is essentially a case of reducing the proportion of body fat relative to the amounts of lean tissue. So in order to achieve that, we need to be in an energy deficit. We need to be consuming less than we're burning. So I'll work out so one of the one part of our overall amount of burn. But the biggest factor we have to consider there is consumption. If somebody's goal is to improve their body composition,

we need to look at that consumption. They need to be an energy deficit. But they need to also be retaining their muscle tissue. If all they do is just eat less, they will become smaller. they will weigh less, but they won't necessarily be improving their body composition. If what we want to do is reduce the amount of body fat versus lean tissue, we need to be in a mild energy deficit at the same time as strength training to retain the lean tissue. So if we're looking at modes of exercise that are most important for improving body

composition, it's actually strength training, resistance training, weight training, whatever we want to call it, because that's what will retain the lean tissue, whilst diet and lifestyle takes care of lowering the body fat. If we don't do that, if we don't do the strength training, we're going to be burning lean tissue and body fat, or maybe more lean tissue than body fat, so we might weigh less, but our composition and therefore our health may be actually worse.

So in terms of are you going to compromise your weight loss goals with too much hit, I would say hit is probably the wrong choice. of exercise if that's your priority. What you should be doing is looking to move more throughout the day. So walk more, strength train, and be aware of your consumption. Eat mindfully, walk, drink lots of water, sleep more, strength train. It would be what I would say. Where I think the hit classes may create a problem is if you're doing so many of them because you think, well, I'm just going to, I can just burn more, I can burn more, I can burn more. If you think what actually happens in a hit class,

it's not a case of, we'll do this 10 times. It's a case of do as many of these as you can for a minute. So it's doing something very fast to fatigue or to failure. So therefore, your chance of doing it wrong and therefore of hurting yourself are significantly more than in pretty much any other form of exercise, because that's the goal. It's do it until you can't do any more. So you're almost encouraging this technical failure.

So you're encouraging a high at risk. So it's high risk activity done very, very fast. So you're probably more at risk of hurting yourself. than you are of really, because you'll probably hurt yourself before you get there. So therefore you won't be able to exercise, therefore your weight loss goals will be compromised. So yes, but not through the way that sometimes thought. I think you are probably at risk of compromising your goals, but not because you'll do too much, but because as you're doing so much, you'll probably break down.

And as a high risk activity, like you said, if you're doing too much of it because you're working your body to fatigue, what would a good hit workout actually look like? A realistic, goal-based workout that gets you sweaty, gets your heart rate up, works with intervals, perhaps uses body weight, but is also an effective session. There's no, there's nothing wrong with circuit training, body weight training that's been around since as long as exercise has. And that's a, it's a very, very valid, very accessible form of exercise. Where we can make something that's risky, less risky, is by taking out the, the plyometric, the jumping side of things. That's more likely where people are going to potentially hurt themselves.

And if somebody is relatively new to exercise, the first thing they should be doing is getting coached on how to move. So getting coach on how to move through fundamental movements, learning how to do that under control and how to do it slowly before trying to do it very, very fast and under fatigue and to failure. It's almost like wanting to start running. you're probably going to, as the expression goes, walk first, then jog and then run, rather than think, I'm going to take it running, I'm just going to go to sprint today for the first time ever,

and I've never run before. That's kind of what's happening when someone's new to exercise and they jump into a hit class. What they probably should be doing is getting some coaching from a trainer on how to move, how to manage their body, how to move through basic movement patterns, slowly under control, then under load, then worry about doing them very, very fast. So to answer the question, the body weight training class or training session, if we just, if we want to make it safer, we just should rein it in on some of the jumping and some of the landing and some of the rebounding, that sort of plio style stuff. If you rein that in a little bit and a good guideline would be to say one part of your body should be in contact with the floor at all times. If you take that as a guideline, then you're going to reduce Check out the big stars, big series, and blockbuster movies. Streaming on Paramount Plus.

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That was awesome. Now that's a mountain of entertainment. The impact, the mechanical impact, that's a direct mechanical stress that you're putting yourself under. You're not reducing the other stress that we've just been discussing, but you're reducing that mechanical kind of joint impact stress. So take that as a guideline that if there's a movement that requires all of your limbs being off the floor at the same time, at some point you've got to land. And that's quite a hard thing to do. Yeah. I was just going to add to that.

Like, it should be a goal to achieve complexity of movements. Like, it shouldn't be your first goal. It should be something that you are wanting to work towards. And often, I absolutely agree with what Luke said, the complexity of movement seen in body weight interval training or high-intensity classes, for me, doesn't match up to the type of person that's probably doing that workout. And I think there's no shame in,

doing and actually what I would always opt for when it comes to high intensity interval training is a low skill exercise that requires less of an ability to have, you know, things like pro pre-inception or concept of where your body is in space. Things like sitting on a walk bike and doing all-out sprints, like great way of doing the same thing, but in a much safer environment, like Luke said, then, you know, because for me, I look at, let's take a burpee, for example, like we all know they're a great exercise if you just want to sweat. And don't get me wrong, I love doing them sometimes and I definitely include them in my workouts. Do I think it's an exercise that most people do well? No, absolutely not.

Do I think it's an exercise that can become incredibly problematic at if done at a high speed? And if speed is the goal, no, it just can't. They just don't match up. So for me, they're two, very different things. I think, first of all, absolutely I agree with Luke. Gain knowledge of like learn your body, learn movement, start with low skill movements and then be able to have that goal of being able to progress in terms of the complexity of movements to get to a point where you then feel as though you can do those movements safely. Yeah, and I would say if I was designing my perfect hit workout, I would always opt for a low skill option. Something like, you know, what bike sprints, sleds are great, you know, if you've got a sled

to push or pull, you know, even if you are going to add in like, you know, weights and stuff, I would absolutely agree with Luke. Keep the jumping out of it. You can still get your heart rate up and have the same impact without feeling as that you have to be jumping around. I just get too many messages from people who have knackered their knees from doing high intensity chaining for however long and sort of go, oh, I've done it for a year and my knees really hurt and now I'm looking for something else. And the other thing that I would say, which Luke and I'm sure would both agree with is, even if you are going to do that style of workout, fine, if that's what you enjoy, please, please, just keep some strength stuff in there too. So maybe it's that one of your

sessions might be that, but you also make sure that you include some resistance training too, to have a strong supporting structure in order to enable you to do those kind of movements in a much safer way. That leads us on perfectly, Alice, to my next question, which would be how should you structure a week of workouts, if you want to include some hit, what ratio should that be in to strength training or list or any other type of exercise you like doing? I mean, I find these kind of questions so hard because there's so many variables and it totally depends on the person's goals, their ability. So I'm going to be really, really vague, which is probably slightly annoying, but I'd rather do that than be really specific. But I would

say that the first thing is, and absolutely what I would put in there is some resistance training to begin with. So key movement patterns, learn those, get strong in them, build up from maybe you start a body weight and then start to add various forms of resistance, whether that's dumbbells, barbells, whatever it is that you feel comfortable with. Make sure that that's kind of like the key cornerstone of your training program. Again, to make sure that like Luke said, even if your goal is to change your body composition, we're retaining lean muscle mass as part of that. Just build up your tolerance to some high intensity or interval body weight training exercise. I think, you know, the mistake that I see is people go hell for leather on it,

because initially it feels good and it gets you that burn. But they very quickly exhaust themselves in that method of training. So build yourself up. Again, as Luke said, you wouldn't set out and run a marathon on day one. You'd build yourself up. You'd start with maybe a 3K and then a 5K. So again, your body takes time to adjust and adapt to various different stimuluses. So even if you start with one day a week of some form of your chosen,

and type of exercise and that's maybe like a 15 minute session. Start with that first and then build yourself up as and when you feel able to. The thing that I would say, and I'm probably going to ruffle some feathers by saying this, but I don't believe that hit should be the entirety of your training. I think it can be a nice addition and like, you know, definitely if you enjoy it, have it in there somewhere. But I'd like to see some other stuff in there too. Like I said, I'd love to see some resistance training and maybe something a bit more low

impact like yoga, Pilates, anything like that, just to balance out that high level of intensity that you're having, again, to go back to that thing of how much stress we have on our body, the other thing that I would then also caveat all of this is you have to be understanding of where you're at with your body. So I find these kind of prescriptive days off, rest day kind of things like, oh, you have to take one to two rest days a bit binary because I think that everyone's going to be different. And if you're starting a new training program, you might need a slightly more rest to allow you to recover. You might need less. We're all different. So just tuning in with where you're at, understanding how you feel after a training session. If you're getting

particularly sore after sessions, if you're finding your sleep's being impacted, if you're absolutely ravenous, maybe just understand that that's a way of your body saying, okay, it's probably a bit too much and you can rain it back in. Yeah, I'm not going to sit here and say, you know, you have to do this amount of training, this amount of rest days, because it's just not, you can't be as prescriptive of that as that. But I think, you know, have, have, have, have you know, strength training is the foundation, maybe have some high intensity on top of that, and then look at something that's a little bit more low impact. And then going back to what Luke said, don't just see that as being your core movement for a week of training. All of our other movement

are non-exercise activity thermogenesis or are neat. The amount that we move outside of specific exercise settings is also really important. So even if it just means that you're walking a bit more every day or you're making sure that you're up and about if you're working from home as we all currently are, just keeping yourself moving throughout the day is also important for your overall health. With the people who said that they have knackered their joints, they've knackered their knees after doing a year of hit or whatever, which is absolutely the camp I've fallen into, what are some of the benefits of having a more well-rounded workout routine? Luke, let's go to you. So by well-rounded, what I would say is if we would go back to these five facets of well-being,

of being in muscular strength, aerobic fitness, mobility, motor control, body composition, emotional well-being. So if all you do is focus on one of those, you're going to neglect the others. So if we only ever choose one mode of exercise, whether that's, you know, I'm a big fan of strength training as well. But if all we ever did was strength train, we'd be neglecting some of those other aspects as well. So we can apply the same logic to any mode of exercise. So we just need to make sure that we're addressing everything all of the time. We can dial it up on one aspect whilst dialing it down on others if we need to. We can, you know, if somebody wants to do a 10K, they want to do a half marathon or a marathon,

then of course their aerobic fitness is going to be dialed up a little bit for a period of time. If somebody has an aesthetic goal, whether they've got, you know, their first holiday in 18 months because they're finally allowed to or they're getting married or whatever it may be. They may have an aesthetic or they may dial it up on body composition for a little bit and then dial it down again afterwards. All of those things are okay, but we shouldn't ever completely ignore any of them. So to come back to your points of what do we do with the people who've just hammered the hit workouts for a year, just take a step back and look at all of those aspects and say,

what are we trying to achieve here? What we're trying to achieve is a more. well body, you know, a healthier body, which requires all of those things. So hit training can have a place there as being one part of aerobic fitness. So the other part of aerobic fitness being the low intensity being the more aerobic side. If you hit training, it would sit more kind of anaerobic. So it would be one half of the five facets. So relatively speaking, quite a small amount. If all you've ever done is focused on quite literally one, tenth of the overall package of health and well-being, you're neglecting all of the others.

We just need to reintroduce them. So starting to reintroduce strength training, resistance training, you start to give a body more stability. So a body that's been kind of beaten up by just jumping up and down for 18 months on the kitchen floor, if we just slow that person down and give them some strength and stability, they will feel better straight away. If we start to teach them how to have a little bit more motor control over their body, so mobility motor control, I kind of group those in together.

You learn that through either specific mobility workouts. You learn that through yoga, through Pilates, through bar classes, through dance classes, any of these things that are also fun, and we can't forget that fun is also important, can help you improve those. Body composition, as I say, it tends to be a lifestyle, nutritional thing with strength training, making sure that we retain the lean tissue. So looking at emotional well-being, and you spoke earlier about laying stress on top of stress, making sure that what we're doing is making us feel happier.

So if we focus and think about how you feel emotionally, mentally, before during and after a workout, as opposed to let me check my smart watch and see how many calories it tells me I've burned, that would be, in my opinion, a better way of looking at things and kind of gauging what we should or shouldn't be doing. And actually, just to go loop back on to Alice's point, that's also probably a better way of judging when we need to take a break. If you're just starting to feel a little bit fed up, that's the time to take a break, as opposed to, well, I only take breaks on Sundays. Then, well, what if, what if this week something happening? You need to take it on Thursday. You know, we, when you're starting to feel a

bit fed up, that's when you take the break. It's so interesting to look at it from that ecosystem point of view as opposed to I work out on Monday, Thursdays, Fridays, and I go, hard as I can because life is not as prescriptive as that, as we all know. I think the final question that I really like to put to you both is when you have clients approach you who, for example, have always done hit and they're burnt out or their joints are really, really painful, how do you bring them into this new way of thinking that strength training is going to be really beneficial? Like what are some of the benefits they're going to glean from a routine that you would perhaps implement. Alice, let's go to you. Well, I think the first thing is really to have a

conversation about why they move. I think underpinning what I think motivates a lot of people to first embrace hit training. And I'm going to be totally honest here, this isn't everyone, but a lot of my clients that I've seen that used to train in that way, it was all about caloric burn, energy burn. And they felt that high intensity training gave them that feeling of, I'm working really hard and I'm burning the most energy that I can. So it's really about having a conversation around, okay, firstly, why do you move? How can I help? I don't ever want to be a kind of trainer that forces someone to train in a certain way. You know, I definitely have my biases. And Luke would have said this, you know, I love strength training and I think it's great.

That doesn't mean to say that if someone comes to me and says, I really don't want to do it, that I would say, you have to. You know, we'd have a conversation around how we can maybe work out of balance with two of it, with those things. But I think it's really about as well, just changing the focus, understanding different ways in which they can challenge their body that might not necessarily be at the same intensity, but they give them that same feeling of working hard and achieving stuff. So I think one of the best things about strength training and why, you know, I love it is there are tangible goals and there's clear progression. And that's something that we really work hard to try and encourage people to see and to engage with is not just

turning up to a session and doing the work and going home, but really getting involved in how can I get from A to B, what are the things that I'm working on? And if someone becomes involved in that process, you can really see it start to shift their mindset. And yeah, okay, it might not be doing hundreds of burpees at the end of the session. But there are other ways in which we can push our bodies. And I think it's learning about how we can do that in maybe a less stressful way. But then as well, absolutely. And I think Claire Sanderson is one of these people. She likes to have something that really gets her heart rate up at the end of session. So we go for a more low-skilled option. You know, maybe that's the sled, maybe it's on a rower, maybe it's on a what bike.

It doesn't mean to say that you can't have that modality in your training sessions. It's just slightly changing how or when you put it into the sessions and being really mindful of the fact that it might not be the type that they used to do, but it's still achieving the same thing. And again, I think the whole conversation around, you know, someone going from the hit to another type of training is really, them being the driving forth behind that. You know, I underpin this whole conversation at the start by saying, if someone enjoys that way of training,

like, please don't think that I'm sitting here saying, you shouldn't be doing it. But I think if the motivation comes through the individual to do something different or to embrace a new way of training, then yeah, absolutely. I'll be there to help them through that. And I just think it is about changing the focus,

having, you know, tangible goals and being able to track progression in a much better way. I guess that's my frustration with hit is how do you know you're getting better at it? Like the sessions usually are random workouts, which Luke taught me this saying, random workouts equal random results. And I've never forgotten it because it's true. So if, you know, a lot of the time with these kind of random hit sessions,

how do you know you're getting better? But if someone comes to me and says, okay, I want to get stronger or I want to train with you in in a way that's different to what I previously did, I can really focus in on those tangible goals and get them to focus on getting from A to B and working on what they really want to achieve, but in a different way. Random workouts equals random results is a great slogan. I love that.

I think it applies to so many things. Luke, is that something that you see as well, is that people being able to quantify their progress is a really important way to get them to shift their thinking around exercise. Yeah, of course. And as Alice says, it's a case of really defining your why. Why are we here? What are we trying to achieve?

Somebody has joined a gym, taking part in a class, engaged with a trainer. They've done so for a reason. whether that's an intrinsic reason or because somebody, you know, a family member, a friend or even their, you know, their doctor has said, go and exercise. But why? I think we need to always be asked this question. Why? What are we trying to do? Does somebody want to run a 10K? Does somebody want to run a marathon? That's probably, in all honesty, 5% of the people who actually exercise, the significant majority of people who exercise will be wanting to feel better. and to improve their body composition. That is the number one reason by such a long way why people take part in exercise. We can't just assume that's everybody because, of course, it's not. Some people do want to get a deadlift PB or play a sport or do something,

but it is the significant majority. So we just need to be asking those questions. So either as a fitness professional, I know lots of fitness professionals listen to us as well, we need to be asking these questions of our clients. if we're a consumer, we need to be asking it of ourselves. And so what am I actually trying to achieve? And then think, well, is this, how is this helping me? How do I know that it's helping me?

And that's where this sort of tangible goal thing comes in. If my goal is to lose weight, is it really? Or is my goal to improve my body composition? In which case, how am I quantifying success? How am I going to understand if my ratio of body fat to lean tissue, has improved because that's not going to be told by the number on the scale at all. So how am I going to measure that? How am I going to understand if what I'm doing is actually helping me or not?

So coming back to that tangible goal thing is super, super important. In terms of how do I get people to comply, if that's not a very, very strong term, I've always maintained, I run lots of workshops for trainers. I've always maintained and describe it this way. So personal training is it's a case of trying to blend a bit of what people want with a lot of what people need. And that's where this, that's the art to it. There's a lot of science involved in the maths and working things out and doing all that stuff. But there's an art to it as well. And that's the art is giving people enough of what they want to keep them happy and enough of what

they need to see genuine progress towards their goals. I might have, I might have an idea of what I think is better for that person, but it doesn't matter what I think. It matters what they want. And it's their bodies, their life, their health. So it's their own journey. And I think we have to keep that in mind too. So my job is to blend the two together. So if somebody loves circuit training, hit training, if they love doing star jumps,

cool, we can do some star jumps. Or we can, you know, as I said, we can maybe try and we can maybe try substituting those for something that's a little less risky, but with the same reward. so a low-skill version. Absolutely. But we're also going to do a lot of this stuff too. And that's the kind of bargain or deal I strike with clients and say, well, look, that. But first, let's do some of this.

And we try and blend that together. The other thing I always say to people is give me 30 days. So let's give me 30 days of doing it this way. If you're not happy with how you feel, then we can do it a different way. But give it 30 days first, see if you're happy with how you feel or how you look or how you move or any of these other variables that we're considering and then decide. I'm guessing that after 30 days, they're probably pretty happy by the sound thing. Yeah. And then that's where we, and then that's when we reassess and say, well, now what? Okay, we've achieved that. Now what are we going to achieve? Whereas, you know, if all we're doing is coming into a room and just jumping around, how do we know, how do we know? How do we?

we know if we've achieved anything other than we might, our goal might have been just to have fun and to get moving. And that's okay. And if we've had that conversation and that person's genuine goal is, look, I just want to have fun. I just want to go and do something because otherwise I'd be set at home. Cool. But I would want that person to consider that there are a whole myriad of benefits

you can get from exercise and or sport. And maybe let's look at some of those. Brilliant. Oh, Luke, Alice, thank you so much. I feel like that conversation is going to help a lot of people out there, especially the hit fanatics with sore knees at the moment. So thank you for your time and seeing on the podcast. It's been a pleasure. Thanks having me. Thank you so much.

Now there's some seriously good advice in there. You've been listening to top trainer and sports scientist Luke Worthington, along with three times Women's Health cover star and PT Alice Living on the weekly Women's Health podcast going for goal. I hope you're planning to take some of their brilliant and totally doable. advice on board. That's all from going for goal for now. Bye.