HILIT stands for high intensity low impact training, which means sweaty, intense sessions that alternate with stress-relieving exercises.
It's the mix that does it: the high intensity intervals drive you with exhausting cardio workouts, while the low impact moments pick out individual movements from yoga or Pilates. This way you really train all areas of your body and use your recovery breaks effectively!
The power intervals challenge your cardiovascular system, strengthening your endurance, cardio and circulation. The low-frequency sessions reduce the load on your joints and ensure that you do not overheat your circulation. Unlike other training methods, which often focus more on performance and perseverance to exhaustion, HILIT focuses on form and clean technique.
HILIT is often confused with training methods such as HIIT, LIIT or LISS. In fact, it also originates from the HIIT approach, but has constantly evolved.
HIIT stands for high intensity interval training. Here you push your body to peak performance in short sessions and use the breaks between intervals to catch your breath and recover.
With LIIT, low intensity interval training, you have the opposite: here you focus on the precise execution of exercises and thus more on quality than speed.
HILIT combines the best of both worlds. While HIIT focuses on maximum performance and LIIT on the most precise execution of the exercises, HILIT wants to challenge you to give your best in both segments!
Every HILIT starts with warm-up exercises. Even if you stretch and challenge your body in the low impact sessions, there is always a risk of injury if you start cold.
This is followed directly by the first high-intensity exercise that clearly sets the pace for your heartbeat. Usually these are jumping jacks, burpees, climbers or even planks. Depending on your fitness level, you can hold this for at least 30 seconds and up to 2 minutes until the low impact part begins.
Here, postures from yoga or Pilates are used. The gentle, concentrated movements calm your heart rate again and give you the feeling of breathing deeply. At the same time, you'll gather your energy to hit the ground running again in the next interval. But don't let yourself sag: Again, the goal is to get the most out of each movement and challenge your muscles.
You always train in the same intervals, high or low. At the beginning you start with 30 - 45 seconds per interval and increase every few weeks until you can do a full 2 minutes.
After each change of high and low, you start a new exercise or repeat the previous one - it's up to you.
How many intervals you train is up to you - or your training plan. At the beginning, most of them are already done after 20 minutes, i.e. after 20 sets. If you stay on the ball longer, however, between 40 and 60 minutes are not uncommon.
Many appreciate HILIT for its varied character and the feeling of doing something for the whole body instead of focusing on individual areas.
The fact that the training is divided into small time intervals also helps you to stay on the ball. While 20 minutes of endurance training sounds like an insurmountable amount of effort, especially for beginners, 20 1-minute workouts are more within the realm of possibility.
The workout is also customized to you, your goals and your needs. Since you can choose the exercises yourself, health restrictions do not stand in your way.
In addition, you can do your HILIT workout basically anywhere and at any time. You don't necessarily need specific equipment or a special environment, but can always get started - alone or together.
You also determine the intensity of your exercises. Do you want to focus on burning fat or building endurance? Do you want to expand your stretching ability or rather strengthen individual muscle groups?
Your HILIT training plan follows your wishes!
A HILIT workout is especially recommended for people who quickly get bored with sports or simply love variety. For many, New Year's resolutions or athletic goals fail precisely because after a short time it is no longer exciting enough, but still exhausting.
But beginners also benefit from the division into smaller, easily manageable units. This way you can do fewer sessions on bad days and really push yourself on good days! It's also easy to switch up the exercises and slowly increase not only the interval length, but also the level of challenge.
As one of the few high intensity workouts, HILIT is also beneficial for people who have problems with their muscles, bones or joints. Because the low impact inserts provide gentle, strengthening movements for the circulatory system and muscles without straining or overworking, health limitations can be compensated for and adapted to the individual.
Those who exercise to lose some weight will find everything they need at HILIT: The intense intervals burn the fat in record time and even in the quiet phases your body does not remain idle. The exact number of calories burned depends on your workout, of course!
The great thing about HILIT is that you can do it virtually anywhere. Whether it's a morning workout in your backyard, an evening workout at the gym, or even a lunch break at the office! You can do the workout alone or with your friends. In the summer, it's a good idea to do the high intensity intervals as sprints in a forest or park. The environment then provides an additional feel-good and relaxation factor, while you also fill up on vitamin D in the sun!
More and more gyms are also offering special courses with workouts based on HILIT. But since you can tailor the workout exactly to your needs, a combination of equipment or even the gym will suffice for you in the gym.
It is important that you discuss your exercises with a certified fitness trainer so that you do not set too ambitious goals too early and thus increase the risk of injury.
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