Is HIIT Training Aerobic Or Anaerobic? (Best Benefits Of Exercise For Health & Fitness)

Is HIIT training aerobic or anaerobic? Today we're going to explain it so that you can

set some good goals both for your fitness and your health.

Hey I'm Dr. Sten Ekberg with Wellness For Life and if you'd like to truly

master health by understanding how the body really works make sure that you

subscribe and hit that notification bell so that you don't miss anything. There's

a lot of confusion about training and aerobic and anaerobic, cortisol, blood

sugar... so we're gonna talk a little bit about this today so that you can set

some good goals and understand why you're doing it depending on what your

health and fitness goals are. So let's assume that you have a resting heart

rate of about 60 that's if you're in pretty good shape a lot of people are

anywhere from 60 up to 80 so if you can get it closer to 60 then you've got a

stronger heart and a little bit better oxygen utilization. So that's about

thirty percent of your maximum heart rate and from 60 up to about 120 is what

we call the aerobic range that means that your body is providing oxygen or

air at a sufficient pace to keep up with the exercise so because you're keeping

up you can keep doing it for hours this would be leisurely - a fast walk it

could be a bike ride something that you can keep up for hours and still not feel

totally beat the next day that's about 60% of maximum heart rate then from that

point up we're getting into the an aerobic that means without oxygen

meaning we can't breathe fast enough to completely satisfy the body's oxygen

need so we're falling a little bit behind we can't rely on fat burning and

using oxygen we have to rely on sugar and glycolysis and there's some other

videos I've done in the past where you can check that out so between a heart

rate of 120 to 160 or 60 to 80 percent approximately we're in the an aerobic

range now we're huffing puffing and we can keep it up not for

hours but minutes we can push it and do it for 20 30 40 minutes if we have

enough willpower but it's sort of painful and and we're totally beat

afterwards if we do that and then we get into what we call high-intensity

interval training this is the all-out that give it all you got

do-or-die kind of exercise and because it's it should be so intense you can

only keep it up for seconds and if you could keep it up for minutes then you're

really more in the anaerobic range you haven't really hit the zone of high

intensity where you get some of those specific benefits so your maximum heart

rate is going to vary a little bit and typically it'll probably be somewhere

between a hundred and sixty to 220 and that's because the maximum heart rate

goes down as we age everyone's a little different but typically you're gonna

find it to be roughly 220 minus your age so I am 54 years old so if I subtract my

age from that I should have a maximum heart rate of about 166 so when I really

push myself if I do some uphill sprints or something I can still get my heart

rate to about 175 so it's a ballpark number but it'll give you a pretty good

range of where you need to be and the 220 heart rate would be basically a

teenager so if you're 60 years old shoot for 160 if you're a teenager shoot for

200 220 and that means you're in within a few percent of your maximum heart rate

so I put a hundred-plus here because myself for example can get over a

hundred percent of my theoretical maximum heart rate but once in order to

get in to hit you want to push yourself to where you're very very close to that

maximum heart rate so let's look at what's happening in the body in these

different areas in these different stages so let's look at stress level how

much stress is it to the body and we we talk about cortisol general stress level

and how much does it break the body down because we want to realize that exercise

does not build you up exercise breaks you down

it's the recovery and the proper nutrition that builds you back up so you

can do the exercise again even better so with aerobic exercise when you're

just walking leisurely when you're on a bike ride in the park then it's a very

mild stress so you're not making much cortisol and there is not much breakdown

so there's not much need for recovery or rebuilding there's no challenge you

don't have to get better really to do the bike ride next time then as we get

up we go from mild to moderate cortisol and stress and breakdown to severe to

extreme and what this means is every one of these has some benefits because the

closer we get the more extreme we get the higher the stress level which breaks

us down and that's not a great thing but it is sort of a great thing because it's

the challenge to the body so it tells the body hey you got to really really

get your act together you got to grow stronger so that you can

handle this next time because if you do this on a regular basic basis the body

quickly gets the idea that this is going to happen again and we'd better get our

act together next we look at growth hormone and this is sort of related to

what I just mentioned growth hormone is a rebuilding hormone it's a rejuvenating

hormone it's extremely powerful for anti-aging so powerful that they often

give it as an as a drug but of course when they give it as a drug you

unbalance the body because you're pushing it in from the outside when you

make it on your own you always remain in balance in your

body so the growth hormone impact on aerobic is very low you're not

challenging your body much as we go up you get some and then you get more and

at the hit level now you're making as much as three to four hundred percent

the normal amount of growth hormone and this stays up for 48 to 72 hours it

degrades gradually so even doing a HIIT workout twice a week is gonna keep you

at a pretty high level of growth hormone in a sustained way fitness now this

depends on what you're after now we're talking more about what's your goal the

fitness impact on aerobic is pretty low with anaerobic you get more and more and

once you get into hit you have a lot of fitness impact so now we have to look at

what is your goal I was an Olympic decathlete so my goal was extremely

event specific at a very very high level so that meant I had to practice at the

level and in the same way that I was going to compete because if you're if

you're a sprinter and you're gonna run the hundred meters and it's gonna last

10 seconds and you're gonna be all out you're gonna be on a hundred percent you

can't practice at 70 percent and then believe that the body is ready to go to

a hundred same thing if you're a tennis player or a rower or a mountain biker or

a triathlete you have to do some base training but then you have to gear it

toward your specific goal now let's look at what some different goals might be so

obviously if your goal is fitness if you are a triathlete then you got to figure

out how to balance this in a way to fit your event if you're a triathlete you're

gonna spend a lot of time right around the lower end of an aerobic because

you're going to be going for six seven eight hours so you can't be

up in here because you couldn't sustain it

but you also can't be down here because then you're not really getting the

fitness level that you need but let's just say someone's goal is health you

don't have any particular not going to compete you're not gonna race you just

want to be moderately fit you want to be healthy you want to maximize the growth

hormone and the all these different variables let's say it and now it also

depends on how old you are so if you're 20 or 50 or 80 years old you're probably

going to have a little bit different goals but let's say you're 20 years old

and your goal is just to be healthy then I would suggest and these are just rough

numbers it's not like I researched this and said this is exactly what you need

to do for this situation but it'll give you an idea I think of where how you can

kind of fit this together so if you're 20 years old then you probably just want

to do somewhere between 60 and 90 percent of your training in the aerobic

range meaning you're breathing slowly you're breathing fully but steadily but

you're not panting and panicking and this is tricky for a lot of people

because they think training is pain they think they have no pain no gain that

they have to hurt in order to get something out of it and that's not true

because at this level you have still doubled your heart rate you have more

than doubled your circulation because each heartbeat pumps more blood

so you're tripled or quadrupled your circulation your drainage your detox

your oxygenation of tissues all of these things are tremendously increased even

at a moderate level long before you actually feel pain or discomfort so if

you're just looking for health then do the vast majority of your time in

training in the arabic range meaning 120 or less in heartrate then you probably

want to do some if you enjoy it if you want like to

Tenace if you like to do spin classes if you like to do aerobics then do some of

that if you enjoy it do some because it's going to get you some fitness it's

moderately stressful and again this depends on how healthy you are to start

with if you're already a little bit fragile then you probably don't want to

get into this range at all if you're just trying to get started you might

spend as much as a hundred percent of your time in in this range and then I

would encourage you to still do a little bit of high-intensity training even if

you do ninety five percent down here and you do nothing here do a little bit of

high-intensity but this also has to do with how fit you

are how healthy are you if you have pain if you have knee pain or back pain or

Achilles pain you're not going to be able to do sprints so you have to adapt

it to what you're capable of doing something that's relatively safe would

be a stationary bike for example you sit down and you pedal as hard as you can

for seconds not minutes or hours thirty seconds you take a few seconds ten 20

second break you go all out again 30 seconds and you just do that until

you get your heart rate up and you do this no more than once or twice a week

if you're if you're young and fit you might do it a little bit more you might

want to do it three or four even five times if it's event-specific but the

older you get and the less event-specific you are you probably

don't want to do this more than once or twice a week for just a few minutes just

long enough to get your heart rate into that 95 to 100 percent range and now you

are dramatically increasing your growth hormone your anti-aging circumstances

and so forth so if you're 50 you might want to go somewhere between 70 to 95

percent in the aerobic range if you enjoy it do a little bit of anaerobic

and do a little bit of high intensity and even if you're 80

years old if you can you might do as anywhere from 80 to as much as a hundred

percent in this range you may do something here if you're really youthful

80 year old and you like playing tennis keep doing that or if you have some

specific hobby and do what you can if you're if you're not fit enough if you

have pain or something keeping you from it then your high intensity is going to

be zero which holds true for the 50 year olds as well but if you can try to do at

least once a week maybe twice a little bit of high intensity because now you

are challenging your body you're telling your body hey we need some growth

hormone we need something to build up the body so that it can get better

so you can get stronger so you can have more vitality and deal with this stress

tomorrow because it is very stressful that's why even though the tremendous

benefits we want to keep this to a minimum very very short duration not

every day because this is low low stress you can do as much as you like do it for

hours if you enjoy it and in the anaerobic range then you do as much as

you enjoy but don't let it become most of the training that you do because now

you're just stressing your body without really getting the health or fitness

benefits so is hit training Arabic or anaerobic well it's on the spectrum so

hit is an extreme version of anaerobic stay tuned to our channel so you can

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