These HIIT Workouts for Men disprove one of the most common misperceptions about exercise being necessary to spend hours busting your butt and sweating buckets to obtain benefits. Instead of working longer, work smarter by using short intervals of extremely high-intensity exercise.
HIIT stands for High-Intensity Interval Training, and there’s a reason everybody’s talking about it: it works! HIIT involves repeated bursts of high-intensity exercise interspersed with low-intensity recovery periods. This enables you to achieve improved muscle tone, fat burning, strength building, endurance, and cardio fitness, all in less time.
The reason HIIT is so effective is that it produces excess post-oxygen consumption or EPOC. EPOC raises your resting metabolic rate for twenty-four hours or more after your training session. Thus, it turns your body into a fat-burning machine.
Warm-up
Once the body is warmed up, it is then time to begin the work intervals. The appropriate work to recovery ratio for HIIT is 1 minute of work to every 2 minutes of rest or lower-intensity exercise. Staying active during the recovery period allows the muscles to remove the metabolic waste and produce more energy for the next bout of high-intensity exercise.
Example of HIIT Training
The HIIT training example below consists of five exercises, each done for 20 seconds of all-out, max effort, followed by 40 seconds of rest. When you’ve done all five exercises this way, you’ll repeat the circuit for three to four rounds total, followed by a cool down and some light stretches.
Move 1: Burpee
- Jump up off the ground with your hands above your head.
- Upon landing, bend down, put your hands on the floor in front of you and kick your legs back so that you’re in a push-up position.
- Do a push-up, and then hop your feet toward your hands, stand up and explode into a jump.
Move 2: Cross-Body Mountain Climber
- Starting in a high plank, take your right knee and drive it across your body up to your left elbow. Keep your spine and hips in a straight line.
- Return your foot to the start, repeat this move with the opposite leg, take your left knee, and drive it across your body to your right elbow.
Move 3: High Knees
- Stand up straight with your arms at your side.
- From there, run in place, raising one knee at a time to chest level. Swing your arms forward and back as quickly as you can.
Move 4: Spiderman Push-Up
- Start in a high plank, and then bend your elbows and lower your chest to the ground, as if doing a regular push-up.
- Once you’re half-way down, bring your right knee up to your right elbow, as if crawling like Spiderman.
- Return your foot to its starting position as you press back up.
- Repeat this same movement to the other side.
Move 5: Squat Jump with 180-degree Rotation
- Stand with your feet shoulder-width apart.
- Squat down until your quads are parallel to the ground.
- From there, jump and turn 180 degrees in mid-air.
- When you land, facing the opposite direction, immediately go into another squat.
- Repeat the same movement in the opposite direction to avoid getting dizzy.
HIIT Workouts for Men Summary
HIIT training is not for everybody. Before starting HIIT training, always consult with your doctor to make sure you are healthy enough to tolerate the training. HIIT training can place a tremendous amount of stress on the body and should only be performed two to three times a week, with at least 48 hours between exercise sessions. This allows a full replenishment of energy stores and repair of involved muscle tissue.
HIIT offers many benefits, including reducing body fat, improving cardiovascular and metabolic health, improving mental health, decreasing body mass index (BMI), and lowering resting heart rate. HIIT is an efficient way to exercise, and it may be a good choice for people who find it difficult to fit physical activity into their schedule.
It is still possible to exercise the day after a HIIT session? Yes, but it should be a low- to moderate-intensity activity and use different muscle groups or movement patterns than those used in high-intensity workouts.
I hope you found this article helpful and informative. If you have anything you’d like to share or any opinions about my website, please speak up. I look forward to your comments, questions, and the sharing of ideas.
Disclaimer: I am not a personal trainer or a healthcare professional. The workouts I post are what work best for me and might not be the right type of exercise for you. I always recommend consulting a doctor or health professional before making changes to your diet and/or fitness routine.
Thank you, Robert, for the post.
I do agree that exercising does not necessarily involve hours and hours at the gym. Mainly our time is limited to other tasks and responsibilities to perform daily.
HIIT workouts are also pretty fun to do as a group because of their dynamic. Coaches can choose HIIT for their group training with lesser training time and just as effective results. I attended some in the past, and they were excellent. The exercises might look simple, but they could be killing.
Regards,
Tam.
Hi Tam,
Yes, I agree the HIIT exercises are much more complicated than they look, but the benefits are incredible.
All the best!
Robert
Hello dear,
A quiet informative review you’ve got here on High-Intensity Interval Training. I must say that I’m so much lucky and happy to have stumbled upon this post of yours. Thanks to you for sharing such exciting exercise tips on how to burn fat, and I look forward to utilizing them.
Thanks for sharing and have a great day.
Hello there, The moves are incredibly vast and appear to be tedious. I have made some of these moves in the past, so I’m familiar with them. But the cross mountain climber and the Spiderman push up looks stunning and useful to me. I will incorporate this during my next work out session. Thanks for sharing this with me.