Welcome back to Get Fit Guy. I'm your host, Dr. Jonathan Sue. Every week, I'll share

science-backed tips to help you get fit, stay fit, and optimize performance. I received the

question from listener Alex from Austin, Texas recently, about the

best way to improve his runtime. Alex shared in his email that he'll be running his first

10K race in about eight weeks and wanted to know if I had any suggestions that'll help give him a

performance boost. I was pretty excited to get this question.

When I was a U.S. Army physical therapist and master fitness trainer, I did a lot of work

helping people improve their running performance. It was my favorite part of the job and

a topic I enjoyed reading research about. There's evidence supporting resistance training,

pliometric training, high-intensity

interval training, altitude training, and even nutritional interventions such as caffeine

intake as effective means of improving endurance performance. But if I had to choose only one of

these approaches, I would choose high-intensity interval training, known as hit,

hands-down. The concept of hit is simple. You alternate between exerting high-level and low-level

effort. Not only is hit easy to implement into any endurance training program, its effectiveness

is also well supported by research. Remarkably, participants in one study

more than doubled their time until exhaustion on an endurance test after only two weeks of hit.

Japanese researcher Dr. Izumi Tabata was among the first to recognize the special benefits

of high-intensity training. While studying the workout routines of Olympic speed skaters in the mid-1990s,

he was surprised to discover that those who performed four minutes of higher intensity exercise

produced better results than those who performed an hour of lower intensity exercise.

Keep listening to find out why hit is so effective.

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