How can I do HIIT workouts at home?

Self-isolation: a term striking fear into people all over the world as cities shut down and social-distancing measures are enforced to slow the spread of coronavirus. Not least if, like me, you are a gym bunny. 

Working out is a vital part of my weekly routine. My health, mood and productivity all improve when I am well-exercised — and I quickly become irritable if I cannot train because of ill health or injury. The prospect of long-term home-confinement fills me with dread, but it is not going to stop me from exercising. 

Until the UK goes into a more draconian lockdown, I am running. It sheds calories, clears the head and reduces stress — which has rarely been worse for many of us.

But it could be just a matter of time until our outdoor movements are restricted even further, and getting the daily endorphin boost from exercise will require a little creative thinking, so I tested some of the best ways to work out from home.

Grit Cardio

Grit Cardio, a high-intensity interval training (HIIT) programme by Les Mills, is a class I know from my gym. It combines short, explosive bursts of exercise, to spike the heart rate, with brief rest periods where you can try to catch your breath. Epoc, or excess post-exercise oxygen consumption — the so-called “afterburn effect” — means you continue to burn calories at a higher level long after a HIIT class.

In a typical session, the energy is high, the studio is dark, the electronic music is deafening, the motivational instructors are shouty and there are high-fives galore. How does that translate to my old Victorian terraced house? 

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For starters, it would help if I had a larger living room. There is a lot of plyometric work in the Grit class, such as burpees and lunge jumps, and while jumping and running in different directions I twice tripped over the corner of my couch. 

Despite the obstacles, it was still a particularly challenging workout and I was quickly skidding across small puddles of sweat on my wooden floor. According to my fitness tracker, I burnt 370 calories in the half-hour class, while my maximum heart rate was 175 beats per minute.

All this jumping around means you make a lot of noise. I was embarrassed the day after I tried the class when my neighbour asked me what on earth had made such a racket — something to think about if you have thin walls or you live in a flat. 

Les Mills on Demand is available for £11.95 a month, with a free trial for 14 days. The service is free if your current gym operator offers its programmes; Les Mills says this will remain the case for as long as coronavirus disrupts the market. It includes more than 800 online workouts, with sessions of 15 minutes to a full hour available. 

Orangetheory Fitness

YouTube is a great source of home workout videos. Orangetheory Fitness may have closed its physical studios, but it is promising to share daily 30-minute workout videos from its army of trainers around the world throughout the coronavirus crisis. 

For anyone new to Orangetheory, its classes combine cardiovascular and resistance work, but don’t worry if you don’t have a home gym full of equipment. Instructors replace dumbbells with bags of coffee, pots of paint, house plants — anything you might have lying around the house to make the moves more challenging (I used a large bag of cat litter). During one block of exercise, a trainer even performed a squat while holding a young baby to provide some additional weight. 

The chunks of work vary in length, from five to 12 minutes. You catch your breath between blocks while the trainers guide you through the subsequent exercises. The cardio section follows a more typical HIIT format of 30 seconds of work, followed by 30 seconds of rest. 

This class is no-frills — no music, no motivational instructor cheering you on, no chiselled bodies on screen, high-fiving each other between sets — just a couple of cheerful trainers guiding you through several sections of work, before the exercises play on a loop so you can check your form while completing them. 

The lack of cheerleading might explain why my intensity dropped a couple of times. But no matter — my nine-year-old son, already bored of being stuck at home with Mum and Dad, took an interest in what I was doing and started to offer encouragement from the sidelines.

His best efforts were, however, in vain. Despite cries of “You can do it, Dad!”, Dad couldn’t do it — I failed to complete the number of required sets in one particularly challenging 12-minute block.

The classes are free. According to my fitness tracker, I burnt 330 calories in the one I tried, which was 38 minutes, including the warm-up and cool-down.

Orangetheory has provided text updates and daily digital content for members, with local content on its Instagram page. The hope is that its community stays engaged if, as expected, its studios remain closed for a long period of time. 

Joe Wicks, The Body Coach

Joe Wicks, a personal trainer known as The Body Coach to his massive social media following, counts more than 2m subscribers to his YouTube channel, where he posts free HIIT workouts. I have used them when away on holiday or travelling for work with no hotel gym. He has even designed some sessions you can do with your children.

As schools around the world close because of the threat of coronavirus, it is surely only a matter of time before our children are driving us up the wall as we struggle to combine childcare with working from home.

I pulled my kids out of school a week before the official closure here in London, so I had an early taste of the challenge of home schooling. I have so far replaced PE classes with daily bicycle and scooter rides round the nearest park. But London boroughs are already adopting the policies of other European cities and closing access to some green spaces.

Can Wicks save the day? He has provided some comfort for parents by live-streaming and uploading a new 30 minute PE workout for kids five days a week throughout the coronavirus crisis. 

He also offers a HIIT class for kids which is just 18 minutes long. The moves, which he performs on screen alongside seven-year-old training partner Sid, include squats, high knee raises, mountain climbers, burpees and star jumps. You work for 30 seconds then rest for 30 seconds, and the exercises are all fairly easy to execute. It does not sound like much, but by the time we are done my fitness tracker reckons I’ve burnt 154 calories. 

Wicks had the attention of my nine-year-old, who stuck with the workout until the end, his competitive streak on display when he fitted in more burpees than I was capable of in the last set.

For my five-year-old, it was less successful. She struggled with some of the exercises, her form was at best unorthodox, and she gave up before the end. But I applauded her effort and we ended the class with sweaty family high-fives. It was the same story for the longer-form PE classes. My oldest child managed the full half an hour. The youngest soon decided HIIT is not for her.

The World Health Organization says people who are confined to their home should try to maintain their daily routines as much as possible. In Seville, Spain, some residents in lockdown took to their balconies as a fitness instructor conducted a group class from a rooftop.

This crisis has temporarily denied us some of our freedoms. It does not have to stop us from getting our fix of exercise. 

This article is part of a new series from FT Globetrotter on health and fitness during the coronavirus crisis.

Read how FT staff, from London to Delhi, work out with little space, time or equipment, and our marathoner-in-chief’s reflection on pounding the pavement during a pandemic.

Up next: two personal trainers develop bespoke workouts for a range of ages and experience levels.

See more at ft.com/globetrotter