Hello and Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a fantastic festive period and some of you took my advice on hints and tips to help you not put on too many ‘lbs’ over the Christmas period.

I’m not going to go on about the ‘New Year’s resolutions’ and ‘new year, new me’ stuff as the worst thing to do after the sparkly festive season is strip yourself of anything fun and enjoyable and - pardon the pun -  go ‘cold turkey’.

I start my first blog of the New Year by talking about HIIT – high intensity interval training. This has been a huge trend in the fitness industry over the last few years and I think it will really come to life in 2016.

The idea behind it is; it’s short, sharp, fast and explosive. If your January is going anything like mine, then finding time to exercise is probably the most crucial factor.

That’s the best thing about HIIT – it’s proven that a 20 to 30 minute HIIT workout can burn as many calories if not more as a longer, less intense workout.

I don’t want to go too technical but here’s a bit of the science behind HIIT... 

We activate fast twitch muscle fibres during HIIT training due to the explosiveness of the exercises which require more energy so in turn burn more calories.

Also due to the anaerobic nature of HIIT, your body will burn calories during and for a long time after the actual workout due to the massive amount of oxygen needed to perform explosive moves.

There’s many ways HIIT can be done. One way is the emergence of many high intensity classes like metafit, insanity, the Les Mills Grit series and a brand new cycle class called Sprint which we’ve just launched at Village Glasgow.

We’ll be running taster classes of Grit and Sprint on 23 and 24 January during our Open Weekend so any blog readers who fancy giving it a try should pop along...

If group fitness isn’t your thing, there many other ways you can get a HIIT workout in.

Heading to the gym and hitting the cardio equipment is another way. The treadmills at my work are great as you can set them up to do interval training on - setting you tough working intervals and short, sharp recoveries.

A friend of mine actually talked to me on the phone the other night about HIIT training and said he was doing it on the bike, did I know what it was and that he loved it as it was short and effective.

Other ways to get a bit of HIIT is to go outdoors. Find a nice hilly street and do some hill sprints – bringing together the great outdoors and a super tough cardio workout.

My main tip for this year if you are looking to get fitter and healthier, you need to keep things simple and make small positive changes to your diet and exercise routine. I’m not going to bombard you with advice – I just want you to take a few nuggets away and use them to take charge of modifying your lifestyle.

Until next time bloggers, have a happy, healthy January and get HIITing your New Year goals!