Hello again, this is Bedros Keuilian, founder of Fit Body Boot Camp. Today I want to really dive into the science behind High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) and help you decide if an HIIT regimen would be right for you. As you’ll soon find out, the cool thing about HIIT is that you can use it for a wide variety of fitness outcomes. For example, members of our boot camps come in for fat loss and body toning, and HIIT is really the ideal approach for getting those results soon and getting them to stay.

I personally have a mini FBBC-style boot camp set up in my own garage, and I go in there just about every day to do the same HIIT workouts that are happening in boot camp. I’m not necessarily looking for fat loss, because I’ve been a fitness professional my whole life and I’ve got that under control. However, I know that HIIT is also a great way to build and maintain my endurance, mobility, and heart health. For me, fitness is all about being a high-performance human, so I’m interested in anything that helps me stay energetic and effective.

Recently, I’ve been working with some of the top industry experts for mature adult fitness, and you know what I’ve discovered? They’re using HIIT too! You see, they’ve identified the four key factors that adults over 55 need to maintain an active, independent, happy lifestyle. Those factors are functional mobility, power, balance, and stamina, and HIIT addresses all four of those. Plus, since HIIT incorporates such a diverse range of exercises, mature adults and their trainers can modify their regimens to account for pretty much any health condition.

The Science of HIIT

So how does HIIT work? To illustrate, let me start with an example of a typical HIIT workout you can find in one of our boot camps.

To begin with, the trainer will have everyone do some warm-up exercises like jumping jacks, arm swings, or squats while demonstrating each of the workout stations. Each station will include two intense exercises that incorporate either cardio or resistance training. Then, everyone will go through each station and alternate between the two exercises for three rounds, with 40 seconds of activity and 10 seconds of rest per exercise. Once everyone has gone through each station, the workout is done! And the whole thing only takes 30 minutes.

Now that 30-minute time limit is crucially important. You see, we actually recommend that people don’t double up on sessions, because that immediately leads to diminishing returns. Why? Because HIIT is all about changing the state of your body and turning it into a fat-burning machine, not about brute force weight loss.

Most traditional weight loss techniques are about brute force. “If I do this exercise at X intensity for Y amount of time, I should burn Z calories.” The problem with that way of thinking is that it completely ignores homeostasis, which is the human body’s natural way of resisting change and staying with what works well enough in the moment. In other words, if someone is currently out of shape, their body is going to fight to keep them out of shape because it thinks there’s less overall risk in changing that condition. So if they try to burn the fat through sheer brute force, their body may lose a few pounds at first but it will quickly plateau. Their body will accept workout mode as just a new, separate status quo and stabilize there.

HIIT is more sophisticated than that. With HIIT, you are forcing your body out of its comfort zone. With the high intensity and the dynamic range of exercises, your body (and specifically your metabolism) stop trying to stabilize and instead just make a mad dash to keep up with the workout. Then, instead of stretching out the workout and running back into another plateau, you stop the workout and go home and rest. That’s where the rubber meets the road, because even when you rest your body still keeps your metabolism way up. Obviously, that helps a ton with fat loss, but if you keep doing HIIT consistently for a few weeks or even months, you end up training your body to stay in that alert, high-performance state and not slip into basic survival mode.

Ultimately, HIIT does establish a new status quo for your body, but it’s a status quo that is really darn good at burning fat, has high endurance, encourages muscle growth, keeps your heart strong, and comes with a ton of other benefits.

Think of it like momentum: whenever an object is sitting still or moving at a set speed, you need an extra blast of force to make it accelerate to the next level. That’s exactly what HIIT does. It’s physiological acceleration. It’s more than “burning fat,” it’s creating a body that burns fat consistently!

Is HIIT Right for You?

So now that you understand the science behind HIIT, let’s see if it’s right for you.

First, you need to see if HIIT is right for your fitness goals. In my experience, the vast majority of people come to fitness looking for fat loss, body toning, or general health maintenance. For each of those, HIIT is a great way to go.

Now, if you’re looking for something more specialized, like athletic performance or body building, you probably shouldn’t start with HIIT. Among professional athletes and body builders, there’s plenty of debate about whether to include HIIT. Some see it as a good way to establish baseline health, while others see it as too generalized for competitive fitness performance. Either way, if you’re looking for performance you’re going to need more than HIIT alone can give, so start with a more specialized regimen and see if there’s room within that to fit some HIIT.

If you decide that HIIT really is appropriate to your goals, then the only real question left is how to implement it. Remember, with HIIT it’s the variety and intensity of the exercises that’s more important than the exact exercises themselves, so you can modify and swap things out to your heart’s content. Also, considering how little equipment you need, you can set up an HIIT workout almost anywhere, any time.

Of course, I do recommend seeking out professional guidance like a boot camp or a personal trainer if you want to get the most out of HIIT. A certified fitness professional can make sure your form is correct (which makes a HUGE difference) and give you the motivation and accountability to stay on course.

Now get out there, have fun, and enjoy the world’s most efficient workout!

Hey there, this is Bedros Keuilian, founder of Fit Body Boot Camp. You may have seen one of our locations pop up in your neighborhood recently, and maybe you’re curious about our approach to fitness. Well, today I’m here to show you just that. That’s right, I’m going to explain the entire Fit Body Boot Camp philosophy right here (even the parts you can use at home!)

Our philosophy really comes down to three main components: using the right workout, following the right nutrition plan, and joining the right community. For each of these components, we have a unique approach that we’ve developed by applying our own fitness expertise and incorporating direct feedback from our thousands of members. I should point out here that each of these components are equally important: they support each other, and none of them would work just on its own.

Now let’s look at each of these components in-depth.

The Right Workout

On the surface, you might look at our workouts and think they are designed for convenience. Each workout is only 30 minutes long, and most of our members come in for 3-4 workouts per week. While our members certainly do find our workouts convenient, we consider convenience a happy side-effect of our real goal: finding the most efficient workout formula for lasting weight loss results.

The key word there is “efficient.” In the past, most weight loss workout formulas required huge time commitments. They were mostly developed by and for people who are already way into fitness, people who don’t mind spending hours and hours in the gym every day.

The reality is, most people don’t have that kind of time. Most people have 40-hour work weeks or more, families to feed and spend time with, and if they can even manage the time after all that they have hobbies. We knew we needed to develop a formula that would help these people burn the maximum amount of calories per minute of workout time.

That’s when we discovered a training technique with incredible promise, something called High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). There’s a lot of sophisticated science that goes into HIIT, but the core idea is actually quite simple: by chopping your workout into short bursts of intense activity and using a wide variety of muscle groups, you can supercharge your body’s metabolism and burn more calories per minute than you would ever burn on a treadmill.

Through careful tweaking, field testing, and refining, we took the core idea of HIIT and put our own special twist on it: the Afterburn Effect. See, we found a way to actually increase your metabolism for up to 31 hours after you finish your workout. Again, there’s a lot of sophisticated science behind this (the technical term is Excess Post-Exercise Oxygen Consumption) but the basic idea remains simple: we train our members to use the most efficient workout possible so they can burn calories even when they’re resting at home.

So what does all this look like in practice? Well, allow me to paint you a mental picture of one of our boot camp locations. The first thing you notice is that there’s not a lot of equipment in the building. Sure, there’s a set of suspension cables in one corner, battle ropes in another, and tucked in along the walls are medicine balls, dumbbells, kettlebells, and a few boxes, but that’s it. There’s no heavy, complicated gym equipment, and the center of the room is totally open. Once the workout starts, you figure out why – most of the exercises are classic moves like jumping jacks, push ups and squats.

That’s another great thing about our formula: it doesn’t require any complicated equipment or special moves. The Afterburn Effect comes from doing the right moves in the right order with the right intensity, so the moves themselves are quite simple, and we like it that way. Why make getting in shape more complicated than it needs to be?

The Right Nutrition

If there’s one piece of advice I can’t stress enough, it’s this: you cannot out-train a bad diet. That’s why our trainers at Fit Body Boot Camp do something that a lot of programs don’t bother with: they actually sit down with every boot camp member individually and help them plan out their new diet.

Now I have to admit, the world of nutrition is where I get especially annoyed with all the hype and nonsense in the world. With workouts, wasting hours of your time on a treadmill may not help you lose weight, but it at least won’t hurt you. By contrast, the world of nutrition is full of starvation diets, magic pills and mysterious juices that don’t help anyone lose weight and often cause nasty side effects.

At Fit Body Boot Camp, we believe in a simple, healthy diet that will keep you happy and energized while also keeping off the weight you’re trying to burn. That means rearranging your eating schedule to maximize your body’s metabolism and filling you up with fresh, whole foods that are packed with protein and essential vitamins.

Speaking of which, there’s another common lie about nutrition that really gets under my skin: the idea that losing weight requires that you eat less food. This is an absolute lie, and it’s one that I find almost confusing in how wrong it is.

See, the truth is, if everyone on Earth right now were to start eating their ideal diet, the grand majority of us would be eating more food than we do right now. And this is not exactly a secret – any nutritionist who knows their stuff can tell you that eating more of the right foods is far more important than eating less overall. That’s why the parts of this country that have the worst obesity rates also have the worst rates of malnutrition.

And that’s what confuses me: why is there not a huge buzz around the opportunity to eat more? Last time I checked, most people love food and wouldn’t mind having more of it. Of course, you do still need to plan when and what you eat, but if anyone ever tries to tell you that eating less equals faster weight loss, turn the other way and run. Whatever they’re trying to sell you is a scam and it will do more harm than good.

So what does the right plan look like? To start with, we encourage all our members to switch from eating three big meals per day to eating five or six slightly smaller meals per day. Again, most people end up eating more food per day after making this switch. Now, your number of meals per day may seem like sort of a trivial thing, but this is actually a crucial component of any good nutrition plan.

The problem with eating three big meals per day is that it forces your body’s metabolism to go through huge peaks and valleys throughout the day, which is an inefficient way to burn calories. Think about it: at each big meal, you’re signaling your body to spike your metabolism way up, and in the long breaks between meals you’re signaling your body to bring your metabolism way back down. Unfortunately, this means that between meals you still have a big lump of food in your stomach digesting at a painfully slow rate, leaving you feeling sluggish and causing weight gain. Then, when you finally do have your next meal your body has to scramble to get your metabolism back up to speed. See how inefficient that is?

Now, if you follow our advice and eat smaller, more frequent meals throughout the day, your body is able to keep your metabolism much more even and efficient. At each meal, your body signals your metabolism to bump up just slightly, since you aren’t consuming that much food at once. And, since your meals are closer together, your metabolism doesn’t dip down as much between meals. Once you get into the groove of it, your body quickly converts food to energy every time you eat. No more sluggish feelings, and no more weight gain – just a healthier, happier body.

Our advice for what people should eat is, once again, a simple idea backed up by a lot of science. We encourage our members to reduce if not eliminate the processed foods in their diet. We also encourage them to eat a healthy balance of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats (the exact ratio is different for each person). That reminds me of another myth: the idea that carbohydrates and fats are to be avoided at all costs. False. Carbohydrates and fats are natural, necessary parts of the the human diet. Always have been, always will be. The key to smart nutrition is to just keep them in proper proportion with other nutrients.

The great thing about our approach to nutrition is that it gives our members a lot of flexibility. As long as they use fresh, whole ingredients and follow the right meal plan, our members can enjoy pretty much whatever foods they want. The last thing we want is for people to see their meal plan as a chore or a burden. Look, I’m a big fan of food myself, and even as a fitness professional I would be furious if anyone ever slapped my wrist and told me I couldn’t enjoy a good steak.

In fact, we at Fit Body Boot Camp are so committed to keeping food fun (and so confident in the power of our program) that we allow our members a “cheat day” every week when they can eat whatever they want. Seriously, anything. We’ve found that our members have a much easier time staying motivated when they know they can still have their favorite foods.

The Right Community

Again, this is an area of fitness that I think is just now starting to get the attention it deserves. Too many times in the past, fitness experts and their clients have had a very rocky relationship. Clients have often seen their trainers as harsh, finger-waving authority figures who make them feel bad about themselves, and trainers have often seen their clients as unmotivated and stuck in their ways.

With Fit Body Boot Camp, I knew I wanted to build and maintain a completely different kind of culture because I knew that the right culture would give each member the right mindset and therefore the best possible results. That’s why everything we do, everything from our social media engagement to our trainer-member interactions, centers around cooperation and self-love. In fact, we think of all our members and trainers as part of one big family, and we even set up special Facebook groups where the Family can meet up and support each other.

Too often, people in the fitness world will say really nasty things about themselves and other people and say they’re just trying to “motivate.” I can tell you from experience that motivation just doesn’t work that way. There have been periods of my life where I was surrounded by negative, critical people, and periods where I was surrounded by positive, encouraging people. I can tell you for a fact that the positive people have helped me achieve more personal and professional growth than the negative ones ever did. These days, I make a very conscious effort to only hang around with positive people, and I’ve built that same philosophy into Fit Body Boot Camp.

When we hire trainers, we don’t just hire people who can train well. We hire people who can train well and who genuinely care about other people’s fitness, and we make sure they show that care every day through their actions. When one of our members starts missing boot camp, their trainer will call them personally to check up on them and do whatever it takes to get them back on track. If that means talking that member through some personal problems, our trainers will do it.

The truth is, getting fit isn’t always easy. And life can throw new challenges at us any second. That’s why to really get fit and stay fit, each of us needs a community of like-minded people to keep us accountable. Family and friends are a great place to start, but not everyone has the most supportive people in their lives. That’s why I set up Fit Body Boot Camp to be the positive, encouraging community that so many people need in their lives.