When I started my parkour training a few weeks ago, I noticed that even thought I could jog for hours, the jumping and rolling quickly killed my endurance. Guess I fell for the typical exercise trap: Keep doing a single kind of exercise and you will only train a subset of your muscles, leaving the remainder as a bottleneck that painfully surfaces as soon as you embark onto something new.
One thing I did was to include a few all-out sprints near the end of my jogs. For example: moderate jogging for 40 minutes, 10 second sprint, walking for 5 minutes, another 10 second sprint, walking for 5 minutes, easy jogging 10 minutes. Mind you, 10 seconds isn’t much but by “all-out”, I actually mean it: running at absolute maximum speed, pushing as hard as you possibly can.
You’ll feel really drained after the sprints, but a week after or so, I began noticing an increase in overall energy as in being more awake and optimistic. So much in fact, that I decided to research this subject. And I came to gather some rather surprising finds:
- Training at high intensity burns more fat. For decades, low intensity, long distance running has been recommended as the way to lose excess body fat. Just about any fitness guide will advocate this idea. But: While high intensity burns more carbohydrates and less fat, it will increase the overall metabolismic rate for several hours after the exercise, burning a lot more fat than the low intensity training possibly can.
- Higher intensity means more muscle growth. During the extended recovery time after a high intensity workout, your body builds up muscle mass. Muscles are commonly referred to as “active tissue” since they consume energy while idle and even more when in use. A muscle burns about 9 times as many calories than an equivalent mass of fat. And during one year, a muscle will burn about 5 times its own mass in fat.
- Sprinting does increase your endurance. Common training systems that draw the famous line between “aerobic” and “anaerobic” exercise teach that in order to gain endurance, you need to run slow and long. Long runs make sense as they can teach you to run more efficient, reduce impact on joints and develop a longer stride. But high intensity training will increase your endurance more in a shorter time than traditional training can do in a longer time.
- Extreme intensity exercise makes your body produce growth hormone. This hormone improves your mood, increases disease resistance, accelerates muscle growth and even slows down the aging process. Of course the risk of injuries is the highest for this kind of training.
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