Beginner HIIT workouts use simple, low-skill movements and modest rep counts so you can hold good form from the first round to the last. The sessions here stick to air squats, push-ups, sit-ups, lunges and jumping jacks, and keep total working time short enough to finish without your technique falling apart.
21 free workouts · bodyweight only · no account required
Run any of these on a proper interval timer with audio cues — free in the WODR iOS app.
Get the free appTwo things, mostly: how technical the movements are, and how much volume sits between you and the finish. A beginner session avoids skills that take months to develop and keeps the rep counts low enough that the last round still looks like the first. None of that makes the workout easy — intensity is relative, and a well-scaled beginner AMRAP is genuinely hard — but it does make it safe to do unsupervised.
If you are new to interval training, EMOM is the most forgiving place to begin. The structure enforces rest whether you want it or not, which prevents the single most common beginner error: going out at a pace that is unsustainable by round three.
Once the movements feel automatic, AMRAP is the natural next step, because it asks you to make your own pacing decisions. Save For Time and Tabata for when you have a reliable sense of what your sustainable effort actually feels like.
Scaling is not a compromise, it is the point. Push-ups from a raised surface, lunges without the jump, burpees without the push-up, half the prescribed reps — all of it is legitimate, and all of it produces a better training effect than grinding through a workout that is too hard at a pace that wrecks your form.
A reasonable target is finishing a session feeling like you could have done one more round. Every workout page below lists substitutions for its specific movements.