How to Create a HIIT Program on PT-Helper

After attending the National Strength and Conditioning Association’s 2018 Personal Trainer conference, it has become obvious that there is an incredible array of exercise options that personal trainers or wellness coaches can recommend to their clients. Variations include weight training, suspension trainers, kettlebells and many others. High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT) continues to be a very popular approach to improving athletic conditioning in a short period of time.

This blog will show how to easily create a HIIT program in PT-Helper CONNECT that you can prescribe and customize for each client.

We will use this article “The Ultimate HIIT Workout For Weight Loss — No Equipment Needed” as a reference guide to our HIIT program. To simplify this how-to, we will only include 3 exercises into the HIIT program: high knee skips, plank jacks, and lateral bunny hops.

When creating a HIIT program within PT-Helper, it is best to define the Hold time to correspond with the high intensity anaerobic interval period while the Rec. Time (within PT-Helper) would correspond with the low intensity recovery periods within the HIIT. With this in mind, you would add the exercise pictures to the program in the following manner:

You will want to add your exercise pictures in a similar order of rest (or starting position), interval, recovery, interval, recovery, …. The program will follow the sequence of images from left-to-right and top-to-bottom.

In the example above, the program will start with high knee skips, recovery, plank jacks, recovery, and lateral bunny hops, and recovery. If there is more than 1 repetition specified for the program, the sequence will repeat after the recovery following lateral bunny hops. Then the program will start the second repetition with high knee skips.

In the article, the author recommends 30 seconds intervals and 30 seconds recovery times. Following this recommendation, the exercise parameters would be set to

If you are following a Tabata regiment, you would set Hold Time to 20 seconds while Rec. Time would be set to 10 seconds.

The number of Reps represents how many times your client would repeat the HIIT sequence.

For the demo video below, we have set Hold Time to 6 seconds while Rec Time is set to 4 seconds to keep the video short.

If you have any questions on how to create exercises within PT-Helper CONNECT, please contact us at info@pt-helper.com.