HIIT on exercise bike. Help needed!

jadejo788

To go on my exercise bike for 30 minutes, can anyone help me put together a plan thing? I heard I need to do high intensity for so many seconds and then rest and keep doing this, but is high intensity more not so tough but fast, or not so fast but like as if I'm uphill. And how long shall I do it for and how long rest for? Or if I did it for less than 30 minutes?

rankinsect

There are tons and tons of different strategies for HIIT. I like the 30/20/10 method:

Start by setting the bike for a resistance where you can really push yourself hard. You want a resistance level where you can go slow and get a light workout, but also push yourself really hard. I don't like trying to change resistance during a session, so I typically set resistance pretty high.

Then I try to see the absolute peak I can accomplish by all-out effort - typically I just look at peak I can push the speedometer to at the resistance I chose, since I don't have anything fancy to measure VO2 or anything.

Once that's done, the 30/20/10 method is basically this:

Each rep consists of 30 seconds at light effort (I define as >30% of max speed), 20 seconds of moderate effort (I define as >60% max speed), and 10 seconds of extreme effort (I define as >90% max speed).

I do three sets of five reps in total, with 90 seconds of light effort between sets and some warmup/recovery time.

robertw486

For me, I would look at anything I can do for 30 minutes as lesser intensity than I consider HIIT, but it seems that the definitions are all over the map.

As for torque (hard to pedal) vs cadence, I think it depends on what you are trying to do. More resistance works the muscles and anaerobic system more, less resistance and higher cadence allows more overall power usually, but often less torque. For reference the Tabata IE1 required a minimum cadence and a range, but would seem to have been set up for a fairly high resistance.

But intervals can be fun regardless of intensity. If you ramp the intensity way up, sometimes using a timer app makes life easier, especially if you don't use nice rounded time intervals like @rankinsect does above. Once you are working really hard it's much easier to lose track of when the rest period is over. Much worse if you have a machine that pauses such as my elliptical.

If you have a bike without actual power, I'd see if you can dial in a resistance in the way suggested above. If you can stay consistent with resistance and then use speed or cadence to measure from there, you can see progress. Also possible on some machines if they calculate calorie burn.