How to Do HIIT at Home Without Cardio Equipment

YES, you can do HIIT inside your home without cardio equipment, all while the babies are asleep.

You can get just as much a crushing fat-burning effect as you would on a machine.

HIIT can definitely be done inside your house even if you don’t possess any cardio machines.

First of all, do you have a staircase? If you don’t, keep reading, but if you do, this can be one of your HIIT venues.

Staircase

• If you have a full-length staircase, run up it as fast as possible.

• This may very well be enough to exhaust you, depending on your fitness level.

• Walk around at the top for 1-2 minutes to recover, then go to the bottom and repeat.

• This will make a fine HIIT session inside your home.

• To increase intensity going up the stairs, leap up the steps two at a time and/or wear a weighted vest or backpack, or hold dumbbells.

• Or hold heavy dumbbells and just briskly walk up the steps.

• If the dumbbells are heavy enough, one brisk trip up the staircase will sock you, but MAKE IT BRISK.

If you don’t have a staircase, you can still do HIIT at home. Do you have a sturdy chair that you can rapidly step up and down upon?

If you go fast enough, especially if holding weights or wearing a weighted vest/back pack, you will have a genuine HIIT workout.

If you don’t have weights, you can still turn a chair into a great HIIT tool by doing the so-called “lunge step” that’s done in step aerobics classes.

• Place one foot on the chair, then step up, but instead of bringing the other foot onto the chair to join it, it stays in the air.
• The moment you are stepped up into a straightened position, come back down, then immediately repeat with that same leg, always keeping its foot on the chair, the other foot off.
• If you do this fast enough, it will soon fry you. Your quads may burn out before your lungs do.

Another home HIIT workout is to stand before the chair and, in alternating fashion, tap the bottom (ball) of your feet to the top of the chair near its edge as fast as possible; this will force you to rapidly jump in an alternating way.

This will tax you within a minute if done fast enough. Hold hand weights if you have them.

Another home HIIT workout are the dreaded squat jumps. Need I say more?

Mountain climbers, too, will make a good HIIT home workout.

More home HIIT workout ideas: pike jumps; switch jumps (also known as switch lunges); pushup-squat jump combos; running in place with very high knees as quickly as possible; jumping up and down off a sturdy chair, both feet at same time; and heavy-bag routines.

Lorra Garrick is a former personal trainer certified through the American Council on Exercise. At Bally Total Fitness she trained women and men of all ages for fat loss, muscle building, fitness and improved health.