6 Reasons Why Your Workout Feels Freakin’ Miserable

Everyone’s doing HIIT right now, and yes, it’s supposed to be difficult but if you can’t make it through without feeling like absolute death, you may be doing it wrong, explains Neiman. “When people start HIIT, they often don’t realize what it means. It doesn’t mean push as hard as you can for as long as you can,” he says. Rather, it means you do hard intervals followed by adequate rest so you can be ready for the next interval. Without enough rest, you can’t exert max effort on subsequent intervals, and therefore don’t get all the benefits. For example, if you’re doing 20-second Tabata-style intervals, make sure you’re getting 10 seconds of rest in between.