What the hell is LISS and HIIT?
LISS stands for Low-Intensity, Steady-State. Steady-state means that you’re keeping up roughly the same amount of effort throughout the entire workout. The low-intensity part is supposed to mean that you aren’t pushing yourself very hard, but that part is often ignored because LISS is generally used to describe any type of steady-state cardio. The usual examples of LISS are things like hopping on the elliptical or treadmill and jogging for 45-60 minutes or going for a long bike ride or hike.
HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training, aka doing short bursts where you give it everything you’ve got and take breaks in between rounds. For instance, you might sprint for 30 seconds and then slowly walk/rest for 30 seconds. HIIT workouts are typically much shorter than LISS workouts because the HIIT work condenses your effort into a much shorter timeframe than LISS.
So which one should you do?
Both.
LISS and HIIT involve different systems in your body, so training one way does not necessarily make you better at the other. In addition, they also both offer different benefits. LISS helps to train your endurance and your body’s ability to use oxygen for exercise (aerobic), while HIIT helps to train you to be able to handle short burst of vigorous exercise and your body’s ability to perform without oxygen for short periods (anaerobic). Being good at either short bursts of exercise or long periods of exercise can make you a good athlete. Being good at both short bursts of exercise and long periods of exercise can make you a great athlete.
To give you an example, let’s look at my cousin. My cousin has dabbled in both triathlons and weight lifting, so he has a lot of experience with both short bursts of exercise and longer endurance exercise. As a result, he has become an athlete who can only be described as freakish. He can row/run/swim/bike at a pace that approaches world records during sprints while being able to maintain my all-out sprint pace for long periods when he is doing endurance training. He is also great at both lifting heavy for a few reps and lifting lighter weights for a ton of reps. He is fairly new to weight training, but has been able to make enormous progress with it because of his triathlon training, and has eclipsed a lot of the seasoned lifters he knows in less than a year.
For my workouts, I try to alternate HIIT and LISS pretty regularly. For instance, I might do 7 rounds of 30 seconds effort/30 seconds rest of HIIT on my fan bike or rower after one of my strength workouts, and then 15-20 minutes of LISS the next time where my goal is to keep my heart rate around 140-170 BPM. On my dedicated cardio days, I’ll switch between doing something like 20 rounds of 30 seconds of sprinting/30 seconds of rest for HIIT and 45-60 minutes with my heart rate around 150-160 when I do LISS. At the end of the day though, the most important thing is that you’re doing some form of cardio; the type that you do is the icing on the cake.
If you are going to do HIIT, you should check with your doctor, especially if you have a medical condition like asthma or a heart condition. HIIT is designed to be extremely taxing on your cardiovascular and respiratory systems, so these conditions can be aggravated by HIIT.
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