The power of high intensity

 

I was in a fascinating meeting recently with the CEO of our strategic parter LIW – Pia Lee. I love collaborating. The power of working with someone else, brainstorming and bouncing ideas around helps you to achieve so much more than you would on your own. We will be sharing more about the exciting work that we’ve been doing together over the coming months.

A concept that Pia raised during our meeting was the parallels between the fitness industry and the training industry.

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One of the current trends in the fitness industry is High Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), where you no longer need to train for great periods of time, but rather have short, focussed sessions. Pia was reflecting on the similarities between HIIT and Turning Learning into Action™ (TLA) and she is so right!

People are coming to realise that we can be more powerful in a shorter period of time, getting depth with razor-like focus.

The power in short 30-minute TLA sessions saves people the time that it takes to have a long 90-minute face-to-face reflective executive coaching session.

Obviously you wouldn’t want to do a HIIT class in an unstructured environment, where you have no idea what you’re doing, you haven’t warmed up properly, and you haven’t taken the time to check your parameters. Much the same as you wouldn’t go hard on TLA without an experienced person to guide you and goals in place to work towards.

Danger, Danger!

The danger with switching to a high intensity exercise from a previous type of exercise that you’re used to,  is that you end up ticking the box with a shorter session, and don’t work hard enough to create the same results. This is essential. I can’t reiterate enough that ticking the box is just not the way to go.

So if you’re getting into HIIT and enjoying it – I really encourage you to make sure you’re not just ticking the box. It’s not just the time, it’s the energy, effort and depth that you put into it that will get you the desired outcomes. And it’s the same with what we do.

Wanted to share that little insight with you today – hope you find it useful! Please fire questions over if you feel that there’s anything else that you need expanding on – emma@leverlearning.com.

Emma Weber is a recognized authority on the transfer of learning. As CEO of Lever – Transfer of Learning, she has helped companies such as Telstra, Oracle and BMW deliver and measure tangible business results from learning. Emma has also been a guest speaker at learning effectiveness conferences worldwide and authored the hugely successful book Turning Learning into Action. Much more detail around the issues and solutions examined in this article are available in the book – please feel free to download a free chapter.