Science of HIIT – by Ingrid Clay
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We previously reviewed another book in this series, Science of Yoga. This one’s about HIIT: High Intensity Interval Training!
We’ve written about HIIT before too, but our article doesn’t have the same amount of room as a book, so…
This one lays out 90 key HIIT exercises that you can do at home without special equipment. By “without special equipment”, we mean: there are a few exercises that use dumbbells, but if you don’t want to get/use dumbbells, you can improvize (e.g. with water bottles as weights) or skip those. All the rest require just your body!
The illustrations are clear and the explanations excellent. The book also dives into (as the title promises) the science of HIIT, and why it works the way it does to give results that can’t be achieved with other forms of exercise.
Bottom line: if you’ve been wanting to do HIIT but have not yet found a way of doing it that suits your lifestyle, this book gives many excellent options.
Click here to check out Science of HIIT, and level-up yours!
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The Common Vaccine That Cuts Cardiac Mortality By 66%
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…and other items from this week’s health science news:
Vaccinated against cardiac mortality?
Directly? No. But indirectly? Yes.
Looking at data from 246,822 adults in the US with atherosclerotic heart disease, those who were vaccinated against shingles had 46% fewer major cardiac events and 66% lower risk of death within one year.
Otherwise put in numbers, the vaccine was also associated with:
- 32% fewer heart attacks
- 25% fewer strokes
- 25% fewer instances of heart failure
As one limitation, this was an observational study, so healthier behaviors among vaccinated people could partly explain the benefit, but researchers adjusted for many factors, and the association holds.
In terms of how it likely has this effect, the researchers note that preventing shingles (which caused by the Herpes zoster virus) can reduce not just inflammation, but also the clot formation that can trigger heart attacks and strokes.
Current guidance already recommends shingles vaccination for adults aged 50+ and others with weakened immunity, so now there’s an extra reason to get it:
Read in full: This common vaccine cuts heart risk nearly in half in new study
Ultra-processed foods and cardiac risk
If you don’t feel like reducing your cardiac risk with the above method, how about increasing by an equal and opposite amount, with this method?
In few words: eating higher amounts of ultra-processed foods is linked to a 67% higher risk of heart attack, stroke, or death from heart disease compared with lower intake.
Importantly, the risk doesn’t just spike at high intake—each additional daily serving* increases cardiovascular risk by 5.1%.
*This is about the “servings” listed on packaging. Not “one meal”. More like “5 pringles” etc.
It’s also worth noting that the increased risk remained even after adjusting for calories, overall diet quality, and conditions like diabetes, high blood pressure, and obesity:
Read in full: Ultra-processed foods linked to 67% higher risk of heart attack and stroke
Related: How Likely Is It That Ultra-Processed Foods (UPFs) Will Kill You?
Dr. ChatGPT recommends that teens should starve themselves
These days, a lot of people are turning to ChatGPT and similar LLMs for health advice. We don’t recommend it.
Researchers (Dr. Ayşe Betül Bilen et al.) investigated how good such AI models are at dispensing nutritional advice for teens. Specifically:
❝A total of 60 three-day diet plans were generated in two sessions by five AI models (ChatGPT-4o, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude 4.1, Bing Chat-5GPT, and Perplexity) for four standardized adolescent profiles in this cross-sectional and comparative study.❞
In few words: it didn’t go well.
The AI models systematically undercalculated energy requirements by around 700kcal per day, as well as undercalculating protein requirements by 20g/day, carb requirements by 115g/day, and fat requirements by 16g/day.
So, please don’t rely on AI for this, nor let your loved ones do so.
Read in full: AI diet plans underestimate teen nutrition and miss key nutrients
Related: AI: The Doctor That Never Tires? ← this is about made-for-medical deep learning models, not large language models like ChatGPT et al.
Take care!
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Can’t Start Tasks? Try This Now!
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Oftentimes, we know what we need to do, and might even find it’s easy once we get going, but getting started is all-too-easily procrastinated.
So, how to get past this, when “just do it” isn’t working?
When it’s time to get going
These tips are by and for people with ADHD, who typically have particular difficulty with this, but can help most people regardless:
- Overwhelmed? Choose three priority tasks to focus on instead of trying to do everything at once—just don’t get stuck in deciding which three!
- No sense of urgency? Use a Pomodoro timer to help give the task time boundaries; scheduling breaks in the same way can also help.
- The task isn’t appealing? Pair the task with rewards like snacks, music, or a cozy setup (this approach is called “temptation bundling”).
- The task feels daunting? Break it into smaller steps and/or use tools like WikiHow to reduce how much you need to plan ahead, and enable you to do it step by step.
- Too many barriers? Clear obstacles such as clutter, missing supplies, or noise to make starting easier. But watch out! Lest you end up renovating your house while avoiding the original task. So, to preclude this derailment, set a clearly-defined parameter for what you’re going to do before the task, and when that’s done, switch to the task before embarking on any sidequests that occurred to you along the way.
For more on each of these, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Get Past Executive Dysfunction
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Captivate – by Vanessa van Edwards
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This book isn’t just for one area of human interactions. It covers everything from the boardroom to the bedroom (not necessarily a progression with the same person!), business associates, friends, partners, kids, and more.
She presents information in a layered manner, covering for example, chapter-by-chapter:
- the first five minutes
- the first five hours
- the first five days
She also covers such things as:
- starting conversations in a way that makes you memorable (without making it weird!)
- the importance of really listening (and how to do that)
- collecting like-minded people appropriately
- introducing other people! Because a) it’s not all about you, but also b) you’re the person who knows everybody now
- where to stand at parties / networking events!
- dating and early-days dating messages
- reading the room, reading the people
All in all, a great resource for anyone who wants to make (and maintain!) meaningful relationships with those around you.
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Back Tight From Sitting? Do This For Immediate Relief
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Dr. Alyssa Kuhn, physical therapist and arthritis expert, shows us how to ease things up:
Can we just shrug it off?
Sitting is famously not great for the back, but there are things we can do to make it feel better.
You don’t have to do all of these, but here’s a menu of things to try:
- Shoulder rolls: sit at the edge of a chair, and roll your shoulders backwards.
- Back extensions: put your hands behind your ears, bring your elbows together as you round your upper back slightly, then open your elbows wide and arch your back.
- Seated rows: reach your arms forwards with your palms facing each other, then pull your elbows backwards while keeping your shoulders down.
- Side body stretches: reach one hand beside your ear or overhead, lean sideways as far as comfortable, then use your muscles along the side of your torso to pull yourself upright before repeating on the other side.
- Arm circles: hold your arms out or keep your hands on your shoulders and make gentle circles.
- Breathing reset: let your arms relax heavily at your sides, and take slow deep breaths through your nose and out through your mouth, to relax tension and bring awareness to your posture.
- Chest openers: bend your elbows close to your body with your palms facing each other, then rotate your forearms open while squeezing your shoulder blades together.
- Gentle spine rotation reach: reach diagonally across your body while lightly turning your head towards your hand.
- Neck rolls: move your head slowly in gentle circles within a comfortable range of motion.
- Neck flexion and extension: slowly look upwards and then downwards.
For more on all of this plus visual demonstrations, enjoy:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
Want to learn more?
You might also like:
Stiff After Sitting? Before You Stand Up, Do This For Easier First Steps
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HIIT, But Make It HIRT
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This May HIRT A Bit
This is Ingrid Clay. She’s a professional athlete, personal trainer, chef*, and science writer.
*A vegan bodybuilding chef, no less:
Click Here If The Embedded Video Doesn’t Load Automatically!
For those who prefer reading…
This writer does too 😉
We’ve previously reviewed her book, “Science of HIIT”, and we’re going to be talking a bit about High Intensity Interval Training today.
If you’d like to know a little more about the woman herself first, then…
Centr | Meet Ingrid: Your HIIT HIRT trainer
Yes, that is Centr, as in Chris Hemsworth’s personal training app, where Clay is the resident HIIT & HIRT expert & trainer.
What’s this HIIT & HIRT?
“HIIT” is High Intensity Interval Training, which we’ve written about before:
How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body)
Basically, it’s a super-efficient way of working out, that gets better results than working out for longer with other methods, especially because of how it raises the metabolism for a couple of hours after training (this effect is called EPOC, by the way—Excessive Post-exercise Oxygen Consumption), and is a good thing.
You can read more about the science of it, in the above-linked main feature.
And HIRT?
“HIRT” is High Intensity Resistance Training, and is resistance training performed with HIIT principles.
See also: Chris Hemsworth’s Trainer Ingrid Clay Explains HIRT
An example is doing 10 reps of a resistance exercise (e.g., a dumbbell press) every minute on odd-numbered minutes, and 10 reps of a different resistance exercise (e.g. dumbbell squats) on even-numbered minutes.
If dumbbells aren’t your thing, it could be resistance bands, or even the floor (press-ups are a resistance exercise!)
For HIRT that’s not also a cardio exercise, gaps between different exercises can be quite minimal, as we only need to confuse the muscles, not the heart. So, effectively, it becomes a specially focused kind of circuit training!
If doing planks though, you might want to check out Clay’s troubleshooting guide:
Want more from Clay?
Here she gives a full 20-minute full-body HIIT HIRT workout:
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Enjoy!
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Good to Go – by Christie Aschwanden
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Many of us may more often need to recover from a day of moving furniture than running a marathon, but the science of recovery can still teach us a lot. The author, herself an endurance athlete and much-decorated science journalist, sets out to do just that.
She explores a lot of recovery methods, and examines whether the science actually backs them up, and if so, to what degree. She also, in true science journalism style, talks to a lot of professionals ranging from fellow athletes to fellow scientists, to get their input too—she is nothing if not thorough, and this is certainly not a book of one person’s opinion with something to sell.
Indeed, on the contrary, her findings show that some of the best recovery methods are the cheapest, or even free. She also looks at the psychological aspect though, and why many people are likely to continue with things that objectively do not work better than placebo.
The style is very easy-reading jargon-free pop-science, while nevertheless being backed up with hundreds of studies cited in the bibliography—a perfect balance of readability and reliability.
Bottom line: for those who wish to be better informed about how to recover quickly and easily, this book is a treasure trove of information well-presented.
Click here to check out Good To Go, and always be good to go!
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