Comment by doix
3 years ago
> That aside, I believe athletes _do_ use interval training (HIIT). But if you have a source, I'd be interested.
Yes, athletes do use interval training for specific purposes. But they don't do it for the majority of their training because it takes a lot to recover from. Since it takes more to recover, it limits how much training you can do. And athletes recover significantly faster than an untrained person. A fascinating read is by the guy who set the recent 10k speed skating record [0], he basically cycled for 7 hours a day.
An untrained person can't do 'HITT' properly, it takes too long for their heart rate to recover to normal. If they do something like 1 minute on, 30 seconds off, their heart rate during the 'resting' interval will still be pretty close to their working heart rate. They won't manage to keep it up for more than say 5 minutes (random number).
Now yes, 5 minutes of HITT is more effective than 10 minutes of LISS. But 1 hour of LISS is more effective than 5 minutes of HITT. And you can do 1 hour of LISS everyday without accumulating a lot of fatigue. Where as if an untrained person did HITT one day, there's a high chance that the next day they won't be able to preform at the same intensity. There's also significantly lower injury chance doing LISS.
So if an untrained person wants to get most of a fixed amount of time, say 1 hour effective training per week (which is not much of course), what would be most effective for them?