High-Intensity Training vs Low-Intensity Training: What’s the Difference, and Why Is It Important in a Successful Training Program?
Why You Must Personalize High-Intensity Workout vs Low-Intensity
High-intensity training. Is it good for you? And if it is, can you have too much of a good thing? What is high-intensity training, anyway?
What we find when we meet with clients for the first time ─ and this includes professional athletes and sportspeople ─ is a lot of confusion surrounding high-intensity training vs low-intensity training regimes. And when you’re not clear about the difference, instead of high-intensity training delivering massive benefits – like helping to lose weight and better heart health – they could do some harm to your general physical preparedness.
High-intensity workout vs. low-intensity: Here’s the difference
When you’re exercising for general physical preparedness, it’s crucial to work within a stress/recovery/adaptation cycle. Both high-intensity and low-intensity workouts are crucial in this:
High-intensity exercise requires a period of time for your body to recover from
Low-intensity exercise also takes a little time to recover from, but it also improves your body’s ability to recover over the long term
Where many people go wrong is they focus too much – sometimes even completely – on high-intensity interval training (HIIT workouts), with no regard for adequate recovery time. Others only do HIIT exercises, and then have days of rest without exercise. This adherence to high-intensity exercises is a mistake.
You need to incorporate both high- and low-intensity training, and you can perform low-intensity exercises during the recovery phase after high-intensity sessions. The benefits of this can be tremendous.
How low-intensity training helps recovery
It’s important to understand the basic mechanism of muscle recovery – and exercise is essential to recover from injury. Low-intensity exercise helps your muscles recover by increasing blood flow to those muscles. It also helps to keep the rest of your body in shape. Oh, and you continue to get the buzz that the release of endorphins gives you – you feel happier when exercising, right?
“Low-intensity improves your ability to recover over the long term,” explains Joe Lipsky, PT here at Reload. “When we do a high-intensity workout, we stress ourselves, and it requires us to recover. During this time when we are trying to recover, we can perform a low-intensity workout that will help our body recover a little bit quicker.
“When we perform this over the long term, instead of it taking us, say, 72 hours to recover from a high-intensity strength training session, it only requires 48 hours to recover.”
The True Nature of High-Intensity Exercise
When many people are asked to describe high-intensity training, they demonstrate that there is a severe lack of understanding about what high-intensity training really is and the key difference between low-intensity workout vs. high-intensity.
You see, high-intensity workout vs low-intensity does not refer to the type of exercise that you are doing. It’s more complex than this. It refers to the intent of the exercise and the level of intensity or effort you apply. There’s a scale to every exercise, and there’s a scale for the individual performing the exercise, too. Here are a couple of examples:
A single squat of, say, 400lbs can be an intense exercise – if it’s the most you have ever lifted, it’s going to be neurologically and musculoskeletal taxing. You’ll be very tired after. That’s high intensity. On the other hand, if you can lift your body weight 20 or thirty squats, raising your heart rate to 60% of its max, this is low intensity – even though it’s the same exercise.
Running isn’t different. You may be able to jog for a couple of miles at a low pace with ease. Running a marathon may take weeks or months of training, and then require a long recovery period after. You might sprint fast in a 100-meter race.
The marathon and the sprint are both high intensity. The gentle jog is low intensity (and can be used to aid recovery in the stress/recovery/adaptation cycle).
Shape your high-intensity vs low-intensity workout mindset
Where a lot of people fail is that they believe more is better. That’s simply not true. 30 minutes of exercise is not necessarily better than 20 minutes; it won’t necessarily help you burn more calories or deliver faster weight loss.
This mindset exists because we have a short-term outlook. We want to get in shape in a day or improve our muscle mass in a single workout. It just doesn’t happen like this.
“When you try to get in shape every single workout, you never will get in shape, because you never allow your body to recover,” says Joe.
“When you take the long-term approach and understand that there’s a program and a process to it ─and that there is actual science that backs up what we’re saying ─ it takes a little bit of pressure off you. You know when to push and when to pull back. That creates sustainability. This creates consistency, and consistency breeds results.”
If you want to design a sustainable fitness program that delivers results, bear these three things in mind:
Better is better
Long-term thinking beats short-term thinking hands down
Be consistent
Personalizing your program of low-intensity training vs high-intensity training
Putting all this together, it’s clear that real value is created when the training program is personalized. A personal trainer can only do this when they know their client inside out. We start this knowledge acquisition in our first meeting with a new client.
We’ll spend upwards of 90 minutes getting to understand your lifestyle, fitness goals, and daily routines. We’ll assess your physical strengths and weaknesses, and learn about factors such as strength, mobility, and how aerobically fit you are.
By understanding the demands placed on your body, your goals, and your timelines, we can design a program where we know exactly the amount of time it should take you to recover from your high-intensity and low-intensity workouts.
What we won’t do is give you an off-the-shelf program with workouts ‘x’ times a week. We’ll figure out how long your recovery periods must be so that you can perform your sport, take care of your kids, or perform your job at the peak of your ability.
As you move through the program and your general physical preparedness improves, we’ll adapt that program to step up with each level of improvement. This should ensure that you get positive adaptations that result in steady progress over time – and this includes reducing your time to recover.
Right now, we are offering a complimentary fitness assessment – it’s your first step to a new and improved you. To take advantage of this, sign up for your complimentary fitness assessment today.
