ABSTRACT
Many sports involve frequent bursts of high-intensity movements interspersed with brief recovery intervals over an extended period of time. Therefore, the ability to recover and to reproduce performance during subsequent high-intensity efforts is an important fitness requirement of athletes engaged in these disciplines, and has been termed repeated-sprint ability (RSA). While many different types of training have been proposed to improve RSA, high-intensity interval training (HIIT) has been suggested as a means of developing many of the factors contributing to RSA. Given the apparent importance of HIIT for developing RSA, it is important that strength and conditioning coaches have a thorough understanding of how to programme HIIT to best achieve improvements in RSA. Therefore, the aims of this chapter are: (1) discussing the interaction between sprint intervals (duration and frequency) and metabolic energy supply, (2) identifying various approaches to HIIT programming and (3) discuss RSA testing that can then be used to judge the efficacy of training.
