Hills of Doom
Two days ago… my legs were shaking, literally.
No I wasn’t scared or anything… I had done some serious exercising.
It’s an exercise called Hill Sprints.
Basically, you get your ass to the bottom of the steepest hill you can find, and then you run up the hill as fast as you can.
Me, having stopped working out for a couple months, wasn’t necessarily in BAD shape, but I’ve seen better days as a martial artist…
So I ran up once. Yeah I’m pretty good at sprinting in general and I and another guy in my class two lockers away from me are the fastest runners in class…
So I thought “Meh, that wasn’t so hard”.
After hearing about how tough they were by Matt Furey, I figured I’d give it a go and see if it was really that hard…
So I was kind of dissapointed, it wasn’t really that hard.
So I ran up again…
DAMN that made my mind shift like that, boom.
Just running up the darn thing twice (REALLY Steep hill here guys) made a HUGE difference. My legs started feeling weaker and I almost had a rough time WALKING back DOWN.
So I ran up a third time and I was in shortage of breath and my legs started shaking.
If you think this is silly, well then you have no idea how long or how steep that hill is, and you’re running and giving it EVERYTHING you got, no jogging here…
I figured that was enough for the day so I went home.
Now HIll Sprints are what’s known as a High Intensity exercise, and you practice it as HIIT, or High Intensity Interval Training.
Traditionally HIIT was just Running as FAST as you possibly can for 15 seconds or so, and then lightly jogging or walking for 1-2 minutes… and then BOOM, and off you go again for 15 seconds… and you’d repeat that 6 times or so (imagine that UPHILL).
And then you die.
Lol, not really, but you almost feel as if you’re gonna die…
I read an article on HIIT a while ago, and for fat burning, I remember reading something about HIIT being up NINE times more effective than just jogging around for 30 minutes like most people do.
The reason is because the fat burning doesn’t stop after working out. Your body CONTINUES to burn fat AFTER you’ve stopped exercising, so in essence you could be watching TV and burning fat at the same time.
Jogging, for example, is a LOW intensity exercise, and sure it burns fat, but for that to kick in you have to jog for at least 20 minutes and then some, and the actual burning part stops after you stop working out.
So in hill sprints, the intervals are first running up, and then you walk down, run up, walk down, etc.
For keeping your mind in shape, I couldn’t recommend anything other than exercising. Do it, you’ll notice the difference in your everyday life too.
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