Is HIIT Better Than Steady Cardio?

is hiit better than steady cardio there are three main benefits to exercise and

hiit or high-intensity interval training uniquely provides that third benefit so

make sure you stay tuned and hear it all out I am doctor Ekberg with wellness for

life and if you'd like to get as healthy as possible and truly master health by

understanding how the body really works make sure you hit that subscribe button

and the notification bell so that you don't miss anything why do we exercise

in the first place what's the purpose why is exercise necessary for human

health to optimize human health well we can look at it three different ways the

first and primary benefit of exercise is that it stimulates the brain and

movement stimulates the brain so this is dancing or doing Taichi

or stretching or playing hopscotch or tossing a ball all those things activate

your nervous system there involve coordination and movement so that's the

primary purpose of exercise the second purpose is circulation it increases

circulation you increase your heart rate you increase the output of the heart so

the increased heart rate multiplied by the increased heart output how much it

pumps with each heartbeat means that even something like walking where you

might double your heart rate you might actually increase your heart output your

blood flow your circulation many times more than that and what the circulation

do the blood circulating more and faster and reaching more cells means that

you're delivering more nutrients and you're taking more toxins away

that's called drainage and that's a very healthy that's part of detoxification

it's part of staying healthy is eliminating the waste products the third

thing that a lot of people kind of miss is that exercise is stress and that can

be a good thing and can be a bad thing so without stress our

bodies would continuously degenerate they would just get weaker and weaker

and weaker and weaker until they just fade away and die stress is absolutely

necessary it's the only reason the body has to respond to anything to grow and

get better so think about a muscle if you lift some weights you build some big

strong muscles and then you hurt yourself you sprain the wrist you put it

you put your arm in a cast you break a bone then a couple of months later when

that cast comes off there is no muscle there because you didn't activate it you

put didn't put any stress on it you didn't give the body a reason to

maintain that strong muscle and the body says hey must not be important I'm not

gonna send precious resources to rebuild that muscle when it obviously has no use

so everything in the body has a purpose there's that there's a reason it's there

and we have to stress it a little bit so high-intensity exercise has the purpose

of stressing the body it's a challenge it's a reason for the body to become

more if we don't push the limits ever then the body is very comfortable and

there may not be anything wrong with that if you're just content walking and

creating some circulation then that may be enough for you but there are

tremendous benefits to high-intensity exercise because in order for your brain

in order for your nervous system to repair in order for your nervous system

to learn learning involves making new synapses when nerve cells connect to

each other they create synapses and what's called

neural networks and the same process is involved with repair and rebuilding so

they're kind of the same thing learning and repairing and there are two hormones

that are required and they're called human growth hormone

and brain-derived neurotrophic factor don't worry about the name it's BDNF and

just know these two hormones aren't necessary they're essential for the

brain to make new synapses and they have also shown very recently that with

enough of these two hormones and enough of a challenge your brain can actually

make new brain cells all together not just synapses but new brain cells and

they have found that it can make those in the areas of the brain responsible

for memory and that's a major concern for a lot of people as they age they

lose their memory well there is now a known mechanism that you can restore

some of those cells but it depends on human growth hormone and brain derived

neurotrophic factor and the number one thing to produce more of these two

hormones is high intensity exercise but you have to really really challenge your

body you have to do something you have to push your body to failure so if

you're doing push-ups or you're doing squats or you're doing high-speed

stationary bike you have to do it as if your life depended on it

until you fail because then your body says hey what I did this time wasn't

good enough I need to get better I need to become more so I can handle this

challenge next time and it produces as much as three to four hundred percent

more of these hormones these hormones are so powerful as rejuvenating hormones

that they're often given to the elderly as a way of restoring their health the

problem is when you add it from the outside when you give it as a drug it

has side effects and it has the potential of increasing risk of cancer

if you do it naturally through exercise there are none of the side effects none

of the ill effects you have only benefits

natural benefits from it in the thing to keep in mind with the high-intensity

exercise also is that because it is so incredibly stressful you don't want to

do much of it because you want to do enough that you create a challenge but

not so much that you break the body down remember exercise breaks the body down

then recovery allows the body to rebuild so if you break it down too much then it

doesn't have the time and the resources in between workouts to recover and

rebuild so the key to high-intensity exercise is to increase gradually so

that you know that your body's health and your physical shape can can tolerate

it so you don't go right into just all-out

you you build up and make sure that your body can tolerate it and you check with

your physician if there's any contraindications or any reasons why you

shouldn't be able to do that and then when you do it you can do as little as

five or ten minutes there are different programs you can check various different

videos look on the Internet age I I T high-intensity interval trainings and

some of these workouts you can do in as little as three or four minutes if you

include warm-up you might spend 10 15 20 minutes but the active time that you're

doing this should be just a couple of minutes so that also makes it very time

efficient for people who don't have a lot of time to exercise you don't have

to have hours and hours you have 15 minutes you can do it often times you

won't even break a sweat because it is so brief and you also don't need to do

it very often because once you trigger that growth hormone 2 3 400 percent

increase it stays high for up to 48 72 hours it declines gradually but even 3

days later you're gonna have some residual increased level of that growth

hormone and therefore you don't want to do it more than 2 or 3 times a week

because it is very stressful but the benefits stay with you for several days

and another nice benefit for people to know is that growth hormone is a fat

burning hormone so even though you don't exercise for a very long time and you

technically don't burn all that many calories during the workout you burn

much much more energy much much more fat for fuel in the days after the workout

because you increase your metabolism and you're increasing this growth hormone if

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