How Much Intensity Do You Need to Get Fit?
“Intensity” is a hot word in fitness—so how much of it do you need to accomplish your goals?
The answer: Just enough but not too much.
What is Intensity?
First, a definition.
Intensity is the volume, magnitude, or degree of something.
In the gym, we can simplify that to mean “how hard your body is working.”
Low intensity means that the body is working at a submaximal level that can be sustained for a long time. At the highest level of intensity, you’re straining at or near maximum effort to accomplish a task—you can’t do this for very long.
Overall workout intensity can be adjusted in many ways. You can add more resistance to a movement, increase or decrease the speed of the movement, increase the volume (repetitions) of the movement, decrease the rest between sets, and so on. Or you can use combinations of these and other elements to drive up overall intensity.
An example: Imagine walking 50 meters once every three minutes for three sets. Then imagine sprinting 100 meters 4 times in eight minutes while wearing an eight-pound weight vest. The sprinting workout is much more intense in every way.
You can use both low- and high-intensity training to improve fitness.
For example, lower-intensity training is often used to increase stamina and endurance. Higher-intensity training is often used to increase strength and power.
In recent times, intensity has become a buzzword, particularly in relation to functional fitness and high-intensity interval training (HIIT). Athletes and trainers alike talk about intensity all the time, and it’s easy to think that more is always better.
But that isn’t the case.
How Much Intensity?
While it’s true that intensity can help you get results in the gym by forcing your body to adapt, you’re not going to optimize performance if you push to 100 percent every single day.
Eventually, you’ll get beaten up, become overtrained, lose motivation, or even get injured.
Your body needs a precise dose of intensity in each workout, followed by a period of rest.
Yes, you need to work hard in the gym. But you also need to work smart and then recover.
At Fit2Live, we achieve this appropriate level of intensity each day through scaling.
Think of scaling as tailoring your workout (through the help of your coach) to give your body the most appropriate workout for what YOUR body is ready to take on that day.
This could mean scaling weights, scaling total volume of your workout, or scaling movement variations based on what you’re up for that day. It also means scaling intensity appropriately.
Example: If you got 3 hours of sleep last night and have been stressed out from work all week, today isn’t your day to push the intensity to the max. If you do then you’ll be risking an injury or you won’t be able to recovery properly from such intensity.
Another example: Imagine you want to get stronger in the squat but don’t know how to do it. So you decide to perform a 1-rep-max back squat every single day, then do a host of difficult accessory movements for high reps with significant loads. You’ll be sore all the time and probably won’t enjoy training much, not to mention you’re risking an injury each and every session.
Contrast that unwise approach to this one: Regularly lift heavy loads in different ways to challenge the legs and core at ever-increasing levels, but always give yourself time to recover before the next heavy workout AND scale your weights, reps and total volume appropriately each day based on how you’re feeling for that day.
With the first approach, you’ll burn out. With the second, you’ll get stronger and stronger for years.
So how do you know how much intensity you need?
That can be tricky. Many people just go with “more is better” until they’re very sore and performance is declining. Others don’t use enough intensity and don’t challenge the body enough to make it change. Some very studious people keep precise workout logs so they can determine how much intensity they need in their training, but they’re rare.
The best plan: Work with a trained fitness professional (A Fit2Live coach) who can create an exercise plan that’s suited to your goals, preferences, and experience.
Our coaches will build in appropriate levels of intensity and recovery and then adjust the plan whenever needed.
We teach the basics of scaling in our foundations program and appropriately increase the intensity of each of your workouts as we go, ensuring you don’t do too much too soon.
That might mean reducing workout intensity on a very stressful day or scaling certain movements or the total amount of work you are doing in a session or class at Fit2Live.
We also explain through our class workout briefs that some days and workouts are meant for more intensity while others are meant to be lower intensity days.
Either way, we take the guess work out of intensity.
We’ll make sure you get “enough but not too much” from your workout.
Our goal isn’t to have you show up and blow a workout out of the water today.
It’s to have you show up, work hard, AND be able to show up again tomorrow….and the next day.
We’d love to talk to you about intensity and training and the best way to get started with a Fit2Live Coach who can help.