CheGiantForLife

Dropped car for inspection, and rode bike back home.

I like the idea of a quick 5 min. (1 mile) AM bike ride to elevate heart rate.

livedarklions

Probably can't hurt. I doubt 5 minutes is going to make much of a difference either way.
It's not HIIT, it's missing the interval part. Also, that's 12 mph, hard to see how that's likely to be high intensity unless it's one big hill.

burnthesheep

HIIT needs a good warmup as intensity increases, so a focus on warmup is necessary. “High intensity” is in the name.

5min is barely a warmup. Not to mention needing a few sets to get any adaptation causing stress to build.

So no. Just spin for fun and relax when those opportunities arise.

ThermionicScott 

My commuting has elements of HIIT, although it's probably not structured enough to qualify. Each stale green or yellow light that I sprint through is a short, balls-out effort. Similarly, there are a couple of short hills that I like to do as quickly as possible. The rest of the time is sort of a moderate effort trying not to be too slow relative to traffic.

caloso

For me, the shorter the effort, the longer the warm up. I would want at least 30’ of warmup before I attempted 5’ all out.

pgjackson

HIIT requires a warm up, then periods of super high intensity effort, followed by longer periods of recovery, then high intensity again, then recovery. Probably need about 20-30 minutes to get a workout in. 5 minutes warmup, then 1 minute of intensity, then 2-3 minutes of recovery to catch-your-breath, then back to 1 minute of hammering and so on. The goal is at the end you have pushed yourself to the absolute max for 5+ minutes over the course of the workout. And they are intended to be short workouts, typically less than 40 minutes overall. I haven't done it on a bike, but I did it back when I was a runner and it really works. I really liked doing it on a treadmill when you can control the effort by pushing a button. It might be hard to find stretches of road on a bike where you can hammer away consistently without stop signs or traffic and such. But, I have found HIIT to be very effective.

Iride01 

I ride rolling terrain. Isn't that giving me the elements of HIIT already if I'm high effort on the climb and resting somewhat on the downhill?

I'd think it would have been better if you hadn't ridden straight home. An hour or more mixing up fast and slow might certainly do you better if done three times a week.

But if you only do any riding when you take the car to the shop, you better hope your car needs work often. And find a shop further away!



Mostly just funning with you. Breath, grin and have a beer or scotch.

livedarklions

I just gun it when I feel like it, recover when I don't, and don't call it training. Saves on all that monitoring and crap I find so tiresome.

Not knocking the people who like it, but if I want to get wired up to monitors, I'll go to the doctor's.

pgjackson

Then dont comment on the topic when someone asks an honest question. You basically chimed in just to say you think it's dumb and tiresome.

pgjackson

Rolling hills are an awesome opportunity to try HITT, as long as you are truly hammering away on the hills. Those intense intervals aren't supposed to be just a little bit more difficult, they should be near 100% max effort.

Riveting

HIIT with a power meter is incredibly effective since it allows you to make very precise incremental improvements. The first few years I owned a PM, my 9 mile one-way commute (35 mins.) was a HIIT session just about every single time. Strava segment hunting is also a great way to do HIIT by stringing segments together with recover sections between them. As I recall, the Garmin would show you where you were relative to your PR on that segment, so you could race yourself and attempt to beat your PR, if just by a second or two, HIIT incremental improvement and without the need for a PM.

wolfchild

5 minutes is just enough time to do a Tabata interval.

MattTheHat 

Seems like five minute high intensity efforts would be okay training for three minute races. Even so, you’d probably want to do more than one per day.

pgjackson

HIIT is often useful to break through a plateau. One of my best 5K runs was after doing nothing but 20 minute interval runs on a treadmill. I found it easier to crank up the speed by pressing a number on the treadmill than actually making myself run faster out on the road. I had to force myself keep up with the program. It did make me run faster on my actual road 5K race. Probably wouldn't help much on a long run, but the goal of HIIT is to shock the body into response. If you are healthy enough to give it a try I highly recommend it.

livedarklions

I answered the question quite honestly at the beginning, I think we've all agreed that op wasn't describing anything resembling hiit. The thread has now drifted to how we incorporate bursts of speed into our riding, and I don't recall anyone giving you the authority to tell me what I can or can't say. I didn't say it was dumb, I just don't want to do it.

MattTheHat 

What kind of plateau do you think the OP is going to break through with a single daily 5 minute 1 mile “interval”?

PeteHski

HIIT is very useful to incorporate into your weekly routine (not every day, maybe 2-3 times per week). But a 5 min blast is not enough time to even warm up properly. Including warm-up, you need at least 30 mins to do an effective HIIT workout and ideally an hour to really warm up properly and perform some solid intervals with recovery etc.

livedarklions

Do you take a recovery day off of riding the day after HIIT, or do you do some other kind of riding that day?

​​​​​​If I understand it, HIIT is supposed to be a highly structured method to get many of the benefits of a long workout in a short amount of time, so I'm interested in how you incorporate it into other training.

livedarklions

The ability to ride a 4 minute mile.

GhostRider62

Not me. I am a wuss

I don't do more than one high intensity training workout per week. I like to just enjoy most rides.

PeteHski

I follow a structured training program mainly aimed at Gran Fondo / Sportive riding, typically Century rides, often with a lot of sustained climbing. I have on average about 10 hours per week available to ride/train.
So a typical weekly training plan for me would include 2 or 3 relatively high intensity interval sessions (typically 45-90 mins duration) and 2 longer endurance rides (typically 4-6 hours). I would also have at least 1 recovery day, usually following my longest endurance ride. eg.

Monday: Recovery
Tuesday: HIIT
Wednesday: Tempo
Thursday: HIIT
Friday: Recovery or Tempo
Saturday: Endurance ride (often with some higher intensity intervals incorporated)
Sunday: Long Endurance ride

I usually take an easy recovery week after a 2 or 3 week block of the above.

I've used various training plans from Training Peaks (I found Pav Bryan's L'Etape du Tour 20 week plan very productive) and the Sufferfest App (e.g. GF & All-purpose Road plans).

HIIT is a very general term. My structured workouts actually vary a lot in their interval intensity and duration. They are not all flat out short intervals.

CheGiantForLife

morbid sedentary obesity?

livedarklions

Thanks! I am a self-proclaimed training ignoramus, so I thought HIIT actually was a very specific term.

I always figure that a training thread in General Cycling is where I get to ask dumb questions.

Makes sense you'd have such a structured training program for such specific purposes. Thanks for laying it out like that.

livedarklions

I was thinking about this this morning, and I think my answer to your op is a little off--I think you should do the 5 minute ride if you're getting a psychological benefit from it and don't expect it to accomplish too much from a fitness perspective. If all it does is put a little "pep in your step" in the morning that stays with you for a few hours, that's got to be a good thing, right?

Maybe what it does is set you up to be a little more physically active the rest of the day, so there could be some indirect fitness benefit, but also morale is important to pretty much all of health.

Milton Keynes

I don't know about HIIT, but I go through a lot of Special High Intensity Training every day.