I managed another good, if slightly abbreviated, night of sleep last night and reluctantly rolled out of bed at 5am to get to HIIT on time. This time the intervals were done on Bosu balls, which nearly caused me to break an ankle– I had my shoes laced up loosely, for running, and my feet slipped around in my shoes. I had to take a quick break and tighten the laces. And my feet hurt. And I need to get better at jumping onto things; when I get tired I tend to start doing it with just one foot and reaching…
I find myself dissatisfied with HIIT as one of my daily workouts and I’m trying to puzzle out why. I’m more used to endurance exercise or controlled strength work, and I tend to recover quickly from intense sessions but I’m not good at explosiveness. I don’t feel like I have the energy to properly go hard towards the end of the workout, but after a short rest (a real rest, not an interval rest) I’m sure I could do 90% of it again. Even immediately after the cooldown I’m drippy but still have fuel in the tank. Maybe I need to start tacking a run onto the end of it?
In more amusing news… a US science journalist and some German reporters cooked up a flimsy weight loss study, cherry-picked and published some sexy results in an open-access, pay-for-publish journal, and sent out a press release and the media uncritically ate it up. It’s a strong indictment of predatory journals, science journalism, and clickbait media in general but I think it also speaks to the desperation of people looking for weight loss advice. Media outlets know that articles about weight loss guarantee clicks, and the sheen of science on it makes it even more appealing. It’s so hard to succeed in weight loss and people want it so badly that they’ll believe anything.
I hope the documentary that Onneken and Löbl are working on gets released over here– it sounds fascinating.
Running While Fat 
Intervals on bosu balls???
Yep, fun stuff like squat jumps on the bosu, burpees holding the bosu, walking plank push-ups on the bosu…
Do you think it’s HIIT itself or the type/format you were doing? (sounds like it was a class style thing?)
I don’t know! I don’t have a lot of experience with it outside of this class…
I’m glad I never saw anything about the chocolate-weight loss “study.” There would have been too many conflicts in my brain and it would explode.
Can’t say I ever really love HIIT, because it’s, you know, HARD. But I’ve found it to be rewarding. There are so many different versions, maybe this particular one isn’t challenging enough for you. I usually do a 30/60 second interval, because for me I can’t really go all-out for longer than 30 seconds. When I’ve done longer intervals the intensity definitely declines. So I guess there’s an individual sweet spot to be found.
It must be hard to keep yourself motivated without an instructor? I tend to be competitive so I can’t stand it when I’m not keeping up with the class :)
And yet I still manage to incorporate it into my workouts, with neither motivation nor instructor.