Exercise Trends of 2020

By Alex Longworth

As far as exercise trends go, 2020 will forever be the year of the home workout! Our routines have been disrupted and our lives effectively locked down for periods and this has led us all to finding new and different ways to get our exercise fix at home.  So what are people doing when they work out at home?   

Well a lot of people are doing High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). One of our Lead PT’s Jimmy wrote about HIIT a few weeks back (click here to read his article again).  No doubt, HIIT ticks a lot of boxes in terms of being a great and efficient way to burn fat and build lean muscle.  It gets big results and is the underlying exercise approach for our TRL FIT group training sessions.   The best thing for me about HIIT is its accessibility – you can train as hard or fast as suits you in terms of your underlying fitness levels and fitness goals.  It is also never boring – the exercise combinations are literally endless.

So how do you do HIIT at home if you don’t have any weights or other equipment?  One of the beauties of HIIT is that it can easily be done with minimal or no equipment by incorporating body weight exercises – these are exercises that use your own body weight as resistance.  Body weight exercises typically work multiple muscle groups at the same time – think fat burning and all over toning and strengthening. 

What if you have a long standing knee injury or you are just getting back into exercise after a long break and you just aren’t up to high impact exercise right now?  Well the good news is that for every high impact HIIT move, there are always lower impact modifications.  This form training of training –  High Intensity Low Impact Training (HILIT) – is a great option as you can get the benefits of the intense exercise with less joint load and risk of injury. At TRL FIT, our trainers are able to modify all our higher impact moves for clients as needed – just call out if something doesn’t feel right or if you are wanting lower impact options.

So, there you have it – HIIT (and its cousin HILIT) has never been more popular than it is right now for lots of good reasons – it is a proven way to get results, is suited to any fitness level and can be done at home with minimal equipment – something that has provided especially important in recent months.

Alex Longworth

Physiotherapist, Program Director and Co-Founder, TRL FIT