Public health practitioners and researchers in behavioural medicine recognise the urgency to identify, develop and optimise exercise prescription to curb the growth of physical inactivity and sedentary behaviour (Hardcastle et al, 2014; Hardcastle et al, 2012: Katzmaryzk and Lear, 2012). The adoption and maintenance of exercise can improve indices of fitness, performance and health, and offer cardioprotective benefits from cardiovascular diseases. Current guidelines suggest that 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity should be performed per week (Donnelly et al, 2009) and is the minimal dose of exercise needed to gain favourable physiological adaptations to the cardiovascular and metabolic systems (Gibala et al, 2012). However, many people fail to meet these guidelines, with 'lack of time' being a persistently cited barrier to exercise adherence (Sequeri et al, 2011). In accordance, exercise professionals and researchers have focused attention in developing time-efficient interventions (Gibala, 2007).
The recent advocacy of interval training has received much attention from the scientific community. Interval training (IT), characterised by brief, intermittent bursts of maximal or supramaximal activity interspersed by periods of recovery, has consistently demonstrated potent physiological benefits, similar or indeed superior to moderate-intensity continuous training (MICT) (Burgomaster et al, 2005; 2006; 2008; Gibala, 2012). These findings have attracted much attention from the scientific community given IT's physiological benefits and potential solution to the nations 'time' problem. However, a key challenge remains in translating IT from a laboratory-controlled setting, while maintaining its potent advantageous physiological adaptations, into a real-life environment (Whyte et al, 2011). Therefore, the purpose of the thesis is to investigate whether HIT can be translated from a laboratory to a field-based setting.