Written by: Taylor Jones
Over the first two articles in this series, I have looked at how the home gym has continued to evolve. In The Rise of the All In One, I talked about moving away from filling a garage with single use machines and toward equipment that can accomplish more without taking over the entire room. Then, in The Return of the Free Weights, I went back to the basics and looked at why dumbbells, barbells, kettlebells, and other traditional strength equipment have stood the test of time. For this third article, I wanted to move away from the equipment itself and talk more about what we are actually doing with it.
High intensity interval training, better known as HIIT, has had an interesting run in the fitness industry. There was a stretch where it seemed like everything was HIIT. CrossFit was exploding, group fitness classes were built around intervals, home workout programs promised a complete workout in 20 or 30 minutes, and nearly every fitness app had some version of high intensity training. Eventually, people started gravitating back toward traditional strength training, bodybuilding, running, and more recently Zone 2 cardio. HIIT never really disappeared, but it stopped being the answer to every fitness question, which was probably a good thing.
Now I think HIIT is finding its place again, particularly for those of us training at home. My own training has changed quite a bit depending on what I am preparing for, but one thing that has not changed is the fact that there are only so many hours in a day. Between working long nursing shifts, family life, and training for different competitions and races, I do not always have an hour and a half to spend in the garage. Sometimes I have 30 minutes and need to make something useful out of it. That is where a good HIIT workout is hard to beat.
I have learned that the workout I have time to complete is more valuable than the perfect workout I never get around to starting. Some weeks I can follow a training plan; other weeks work, family, sleep, or a schedule change forces me to improvise. Having a shorter option that can challenge me makes it easier to stay consistent instead of treating training as an all-or-nothing decision.
HIIT Never Really Went Away
The basic idea behind interval training has been around much longer than the term HIIT has been plastered across fitness classes and workout apps. Athletes have used hard efforts followed by periods of recovery for decades because sports rarely happen at one steady pace. You work hard, recover when you can, and then have to be ready to do it again.
HIIT eventually became much bigger than athletic conditioning. CrossFit certainly played a role in bringing higher intensity training to a much larger audience, but so did boot camps, group fitness classes and home workout programs. It gave people an alternative to spending an hour doing steady cardio, and there was something appealing about knowing you could get a legitimately difficult workout done in a relatively short period of time.
The problem was that the term became so broad that almost anything could be called HIIT. If a workout was fast, exhausting and had very little rest, it qualified. Somewhere along the way, the goal sometimes became seeing how tired you could get rather than whether the workout itself was actually well designed. Complicated movements were performed under heavy fatigue, recovery periods disappeared, and every session seemed like it needed to end with everyone lying on the floor.
I have done plenty of workouts like that over the years, especially through competitive functional fitness. There is absolutely a time to push yourself and find out what you can do when you are tired. There is also a difference between doing that occasionally and believing every Tuesday afternoon workout needs to feel like the final event of a competition.
Experience has changed my perspective on this quite a bit. Earlier in my training career, it was easy to judge a workout by how exhausted I was afterward. If I was completely wiped out, it must have been a good workout. Now I care more about whether the session accomplished what I wanted from it and whether I can come back and train productively again the next day.Sometimes that still means pushing extremely hard. Other times the smarter workout is stopping a little short of that point.
The renewed popularity of traditional strength training and easier aerobic work has probably helped bring some balance back into fitness. I still want dedicated strength days. I still run. I still see value in easier conditioning and recovery work. HIIT works better when it is one part of that bigger picture instead of trying to be the entire picture.
Why HIIT Works So Well At Home
When people talk about the advantages of a home gym, space and money usually come up first. For me, time might actually be the biggest advantage. I can finish work, walk into my garage, change shoes and start training. There is no drive to the gym, no waiting on someone to finish with a piece of equipment and no wasted time wandering from one end of a commercial gym to the other.
On a busy day, that matters. If I only have 30 minutes available, I can still warm up, put together a hard 15 or 20 minute conditioning piece and be finished. It might not be the workout I would choose if I had unlimited time, but it is a whole lot better than deciding that 30 minutes is not enough and doing nothing.
A well designed home gym also happens to be a great place for this style of training. This goes back to what I discussed in the first two articles. If your gym is built around free weights, multifunctional equipment and some open floor space, you already have almost everything you need. Dumbbells can go from a squat to a press, row, lunge, deadlift or carry without needing another machine. A bench gives you another group of movements. Cable exercises can be mixed in when they make sense, and the open section of the garage can handle burpees, jump rope, shuttle runs, bodyweight movements or whatever else the workout calls for.
You can do a lot with a surprisingly small amount of equipment when the equipment you own is versatile.
HIIT Is About More Than Burning Calories
For a long time, HIIT was sold primarily as a shortcut to burning calories. Do this brutal 20 minute workout, sweat as much as possible and watch the fat melt away. That was never the part of HIIT that interested me the most.
What I like about high intensity training is the ability to keep working when the heart rate is high and the muscles are already tired. Being strong is one thing. Being able to use that strength repeatedly while breathing hard is something different, and that has carried over into nearly every sport I have competed in.
CrossFit obviously rewards that ability, but so do obstacle course races and functional fitness competitions. Even running benefits from being comfortable with periods where the effort gets uncomfortable. If I am training for one of those events, I cannot get everything I need from lifting heavy weights and doing easy cardio. At some point I need to practice working hard.
There is also a mental side to this type of training. Anyone who has been deep into a hard interval workout knows the point where the body starts asking you to slow down and you have to decide how much longer you can hold the pace. Learning to manage that discomfort without completely falling apart has helped me in competition, but it also teaches pacing. Go too hard early and you pay for it later. Hold back too much and you finish knowing there was more available. Finding that line is a skill in itself.
That does not mean the workout needs to be complicated. Some of the hardest conditioning workouts I have done have involved only two or three movements. A couple of dumbbell exercises mixed with running, rowing, carries or bodyweight work can become very difficult very quickly. Simple movements also make it easier to keep moving well as fatigue starts setting in.
HIIT And Training For The Long Haul
This is probably the part of HIIT that interests me more now than it did when I first started training. When I was younger, I mostly cared about performance. Could I lift more weight? Could I finish a workout faster? Could I improve my race time? Those things still matter to me, but having a family and working in healthcare has changed how I look at fitness. I want to perform well now, but I also want to be doing this stuff 20, 30 and hopefully 40 years from now.
There has been a growing amount of attention around higher intensity exercise and longevity, and for good reason. Research on interval training has shown benefits for cardiovascular fitness, metabolic health and mitochondrial function. Mitochondria are essentially the energy producing machinery inside our cells, and maintaining their function becomes increasingly important as we age. HIIT has also been studied in older adults, where improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness and other markers of health make a strong argument that some higher intensity work can have a place well beyond competitive athletics.
Working in healthcare has also given me a different appreciation for the gap between simply being alive and being physically capable. We spend a lot of time talking about lifespan, but I care just as much about healthspan. I want to be able to travel, hike, train, play with my kids and hopefully one day my grandkids without normal physical tasks becoming major obstacles. No workout can guarantee that, but maintaining strength and cardiovascular fitness gives me something I can actively work on now instead of waiting until those qualities begin disappearing.
I do not think that means everyone needs to start doing all out intervals five days a week. I definitely would not train that way myself. What it does reinforce for me is the value of occasionally getting the heart rate high and challenging the body to do something difficult. We already talk a lot about maintaining muscle and strength as we age, and I think maintaining the ability to work hard belongs in that conversation too.
That has become a bigger part of how I judge whether something belongs in my own training. I want the workouts I am doing now to help me compete and stay fit, but I also want them contributing to the bigger goal of remaining strong, active and capable later in life.
What Makes A Home Gym HIIT Ready?
You really do not need much. In fact, having too much equipment can sometimes make interval workouts harder because you spend half the workout moving things around or changing stations. For HIIT, I care more about being able to transition quickly than having every exercise option imaginable.
This is where adjustable dumbbells make a lot of sense. The Ironmaster Quick Lock Dumbbells give you a huge range of exercises without taking up an entire wall with fixed dumbbells. You can use them for presses, squats, lunges, rows, deadlifts, carries and plenty of other movements, and then put them away when you need the floor space.
The same idea applies to the Super Bench PRO V2 and a multifunctional system like the IM3000 Valhalla. The bench can become part of the workout when I need it and move out of the way when I do not. The Valhalla gives you cable and strength options without needing a separate machine for every movement. I may not use all of those pieces in the same HIIT workout, but having them available lets you change the workout depending on what you are training for.
That variety is useful because HIIT does not have to look the same throughout the year. During one phase I might want more running and bodyweight work. At another point I may build workouts around dumbbells and carries to maintain strength while improving conditioning. If I am already doing a lot of running for an upcoming race, I can choose lower impact movements in the garage rather than simply piling more miles onto my legs. The format can stay useful even when the exercises and priorities change.
Just as important is the empty part of my garage. Open floor space does not look as impressive as another machine, but I use it constantly. It gives me room for carries, lunges, burpees, jumprope and other movements, and it keeps the gym flexible. That is something I appreciate more every year I train at home.
Quality Matters When You Are Tired
One thing HIIT will expose quickly is equipment that is awkward to use. When you are several rounds into a workout and breathing hard, you notice a bench that moves around or an adjustment that takes forever. You also notice equipment that feels solid and works the same way every time.
I have gradually become much more selective about what earns space in my garage. I would rather have fewer pieces that I know I am going to use than keep adding equipment just because it gives me another exercise option. HIIT reinforces that because the workout needs to flow. I want to grab the dumbbells, move the bench, change exercises and keep going without spending half of my rest period fighting with the equipment.
There is another side of this that has nothing to do with equipment quality. Fatigue can make good movement look bad pretty quickly. If my technique starts falling apart, adding more speed usually is not going to fix it. Sometimes the better decision is reducing the weight, simplifying the movement or taking a little more recovery. I have competed long enough to know the difference between being uncomfortable and simply doing sloppy repetitions for the sake of finishing faster.
That is also why I think exercise selection matters more in HIIT than people sometimes realize. There are movements I am comfortable performing while tired because I have done thousands of repetitions of them. Someone newer to training may need completely different choices. A good interval workout should meet the athlete where they are rather than forcing everyone through the same movements just because they look good written on a whiteboard.
The Rise Of Hybrid Training
The line between strength athletes and endurance athletes seems much less defined than it used to be. Lifters are running. Runners are strength training. Functional Fitness athletes are doing longer endurance work, while races and competitions like HYROX have created another outlet for people who enjoy both strength and conditioning. Personally, I like that direction because I have never been particularly interested in fitting into one category anyway.
My own competition calendar can bounce between functional fitness, obstacle course racing, running, rucking, farm fit and other events. The training obviously changes depending on what is coming up, but I like being strong enough to lift heavy things and conditioned enough to keep moving when the workout gets ugly. HIIT fits naturally into that kind of training.
I think it also fits where home gyms are headed. If you have a good set of free weights, a few versatile pieces of equipment and enough room to move, you can strength train on Monday, do intervals on Tuesday, complete a longer aerobic session later in the week and change the entire emphasis again when your goals change. You do not need to rebuild the gym every time you decide to train for something different.
Final Thoughts
This series started with equipment, but the more I thought about the three articles together, the more I realized they are really about removing limitations. All in one equipment helps solve the problem of limited space. Free weights give us a simple foundation that can be used for almost anything. HIIT helps address another limitation that might be even harder to solve: limited time.
I still enjoy longer training sessions when my schedule allows them, and I am definitely not giving up traditional strength work or easier conditioning. But there are plenty of days when I have 20 or 30 minutes and need to get something done. Having a garage gym where I can walk outside and immediately start training makes those short windows useful, and HIIT gives me another way to take advantage of them.
Maybe calling it the Revenge of the HIIT Workout is appropriate because HIIT never really needed to disappear in the first place. We just needed to stop trying to make every workout HIIT. Used at the right time, with the right movements and alongside strength training and easier conditioning, it still does exactly what made it popular years ago: it lets you accomplish a lot of work in a relatively short amount of time.
These days, though, I appreciate it for another reason. I am training for more than the next workout or competition. I want to remain strong enough to lift, fit enough to run, and capable enough to keep doing the things I enjoy for as long as possible. If a few hard intervals each week can help me do that, I am more than happy to keep HIIT around.
About The Author
Taylor Jones is a versatile fitness enthusiast being a jack of all trades. Having initially excelled as a D-2 soccer player during her collegiate years, she transitioned her passion for sports into functional fitness, obstacle course racing, and a deep affection for outdoor adventures. Despite her demanding profession as a nurse, where she tirelessly works 12-hour shifts, Taylor manages to dedicate herself to rigorous training for competitions while finding solace in the company of her husband and two beloved dogs. With a keen focus on her athletic pursuits, Taylor’s primary objective has revolved around participating in the RF Challenges over the past two years. In both 2023 and 2022, her dedication bore fruit as she clinched the 2nd place title for the overall scoring.
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