What's the best way to improve fitness?

Hi Daniel,

To improve fitness levels and overall body shape and tone, i would reccommend doing pure HIIT... you can either do this on any piece of cardio equipment e.g. tradmill, 30 secs flat out then 30 secs/1 min at a slower pace... or you can do a few exercises as a curcuit type session using a mixture of body weight/ free weight exercises e.g. press ups and burpees for a good cardio conditioning burst...

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Hi Daniel

It of course depends upon what you mean by "fitness". My definition of fitness is having an excellent balance of strength, power, aerobic and anaerobic performance, balance, flexibility along with low body fat levels and healthy blood pressure, vascular health, cholesterol levels, etc.

However, if you just mean your body's ability to perform aerobic and anaerobic exercise at a high level then HIIT is a far more efficient technique to improve performance...although to optimize aerobic performance, you need to do both HIIT and aerobic "conditioning" exercise. Also, you probably shouldn't do HIIT (at least not proper very intense sessions) more than 2 or 3 times per week due to the risk or injury or over-training.

So for the goals you seem to be pursuing, I would say do 2 or 3 aerobic sessions per week at a constant intensity/speed and to do 2-3 HIIT sessions (but never two days in a row) per week. Also, take a week or two off every 8 to 12 weeks to fully recover and then gradually ramp up the intensity again so as to increase it each week and peak at a higher level of performance in the next training cycle.

Hi Daniel.

To improve fitness I would recommend HIIT training no more than 2-3 times per week with also 1-2 40-60 min steady pace long distance sessions. That is if you are looking to fully maximise your true potential for your highest level of fitness.

If you are only looking to do cardio fitness once a week then HIIT training is the way forward. Try a combination of different cardio equipment or even circuit weight training to also improve cardio fitness as well as all over body conditioning.