HIIT workouts used to be the hot commodity and is why bootcamps like F45, Orange Theory, and Burn Bootcamp ever got popular in the fitness industry.
HIIT is really good at making people sweat. Clients love to feel like they are sweating because mentally, it feels that they are melting the fat right off of them.
Sweat is mostly water but also contains salts, vitamins, minerals, proteins, and amino acids. So sweating isn’t the weight of your fat that’s burning off, its the weight of your water that’s burning off.
Some people will discount strength and conditioning due to the sweat factor alone, but a well rounded strength and conditioning program is more beneficial to clients looking to achieve fitness goals such as weight loss, muscle gain, better movement, and endurance.
Here’s why.
Strength & Metabolic Adaptation
Full-body strength and conditioning programs promote muscle hypertrophy (growth) and increase strength over time, whereas HIIT mainly focuses on cardiovascular endurance and calorie burning. While HIIT burns the calories during your workout, full body strength and conditioning programs will give you a more long term effect. Strength training helps improve metabolic efficiency, meaning the body becomes better at burning calories at rest. A full body program can provide lasting metabolic improvements.
In strength and conditioning, working on more steady state training with your heart rate (staying in lower HR zones for longer periods of time) is what builds stamina and endurance versus staying in high intense HR zones throughout your whole workout like HIIT. Not to mention staying in those high HR zones through an entire workout make it impossible to keep good form throughout the session.
Injury Prevention
Strength training helps to strengthen muscles, tendons, and ligaments, reducing the risk of injuries in daily activities and other forms of exercise. HIIT’s high-intensity nature can lead to overuse injuries. Also pushing through exhaustion in that kind of fast paced environment will naturally lead to bad form and in return, more injuries. A good strength and conditioning program builds their workouts based on functional movements and varying the volume and intensity appropriately.
Somebody’s first day joining a bootcamp that focuses on HIIT is thrown into the group class and does what everyone else is doing. Forget how long you’ve been there, you’re doing the same workout as someone whose on their first day.
Somebody’s first day of joining a strength and conditioning/small group training facility works one on one with a trainer BEFORE joining a group to perform a full body assessment/evaluation in form of a workout. This assessment determines the bases of their program taking all things into consideration like the client’s imbalances, range of motion and current or past injuries that may restrict particular movements.
Sustainable Progress
Full body strength and conditioning programs allow for progressive overload, which ensures that the body adapts and continues to get stronger, something that’s harder to achieve in HIIT with its constant focus on intensity rather than controlled progress. Sure, anyone who hasn’t been working out is going to lose weight and gain muscle in the beginning of joining any gym. But there is no progression with HIIT so once you plateau.. you’re stuck there. Strength and conditioning allows you to keep progressing.
Coaching
Strength and conditioning prioritizes their level of coaching just as much as they do their clients. These coach’s are required to continue their education versus getting certified every two years just to check that box. High level coaches help build high level athletes/clients… and who doesn’t want high level?
