I wonder what the difference in outcome would be if you performed the same exercises at full intensity as you do but took a couple of minutes or so of rest between exercises. It would increase the workout duration by several minutes, but it might be more sustainable in the longer run (at least for me). Plus, when you consider the duration and intensity of any single exercise in the routine, your HIT workout would certainly also qualify as HIIT. Have you discussed that at all with Darden? And, perhaps more specifically, what is the principal objective of the workout and what is the secondary objective.
According to most of the latest research I've read, the key metric that the body uses, especially when it comes to HIT, is the
rate at which system resources are being depleted.
In other words, your body knows when the shit is hitting the fan quick.
When you keep the rest to a minimum and you continue to push the body into more intense exercise, the body can tell that
system resources are depleting quickly. This
rate of depletion seems to be a key factor in kickstarting the body's ability to repair itself better than it was before.
This is an analogy that I thought up this past week while I was on vacation:
Imagine if you had a house that was subject to various weather conditions. If your house was only subjected to long sessions of light rain, which you can associate with an hour or more of walking or light jogging in body terms, then your house (or body) would suffer little to no damage, and therefore would be in need of virtually no repair. In other words, it's totally capable of handling the load that was put upon it.
If your house (or body) was subject to something more vigorous, like an intense 30-minute thunderstorm (i.e. 15 minutes on the stair stepper combined with 15 more minutes of moderate weight training) then there may be some damage that occurs to the house like some missing roof shingles or rain water that came in through the garage that requires that the house or landscape be repaired in a way that makes it resistant to that same damage ever happening again. In the body, this level of stress would manifest itself as light soreness a day or two after the workout.
But what happens to your house if a fucking tornado comes? You know, the equivalent of 5 minutes of intense terror? The winds are hundreds of miles per hour, and the house feels like it's going to lift off of it's foundation any second. And we aren't even counting the threat posed by all the heavy rain and dangerous lightning. In a nutshell, we're talking about a force that will totally break your home (and body) completely down.
The tornado equivalent in workout terms simply means that ALL sets are done to NEGATIVE failure, with virtually no rest in between. The stimulus is so great in both cases that there nothing left in the tank by the end of the workout. There is no home left, only a pile of crumbled building material. And there's no ability for the body to do anything else beyond the workout. It's totally depleted. That only means one thing:
True destructive inroads like that require a rebuild from the ground up, and not just a rebuild, but a rebuild that creates a house (or body) that is
much stronger than it was before. Out goes the wood frame construction and in comes the concrete and cinder block. There is no choice but to build better and stronger than before if the objective is survival.
That's the nature of HIT training.
You are trying to create a brief and ultra-intense tornado of activity within the body that forces itself into rebuilding a new version from the ground up that is more resilient and stronger than it ever was before.
