For the past two weeks, I’ve added a HIIT circuit into my workout schedule with surprising results. I’d been stuck at the same weight for four weeks until I did, and after just two sessions (on a sunday and a tuesday) by weigh-in day on thursday I was down two pounds.

I’ve always been a bit sceptical of HIIT workouts, because you don’t seem to actually be going for that long, so what’s the point of doing it? Why not spend that 20 minutes tidying the house or watching Rachel Khoo toddle around London in a yellow raincoat on BBC iPlayer? My circuit is 14 different exercises, 30 seconds on, 30 seconds off. I do this three times with no rest between whole sets – mostly because this means its over faster..

The fifth exercise of the circuit is burpees. I effing hate burpees (my boyfriend has even come home to find me muttering that to myself as I struggle through them.) But last night I had somewhat of a burpee epiphany. Yes, I was knackered, and yes, I’d already done one lot of them in the previous set, but all I had to get through was 30 seconds of torture. Once the 30 seconds were up, I could bitch and moan about burpees as much as I wanted, and I even got to rest for as long as I’d been doing them! So just suck it up for half a minute and then I could stop, and not even have to think about doing them again for another 10 minutes or so!

Once I’d got into my head that there’s no point complaining or giving up whilst I was in the middle of a workout, because I’d have plenty of time to be tired, moany and sore afterwards, the rest of the sets flew by. Sure enough my squats got harder and shallower, and my mountain climbers started to look like Bambi on ice, but I was doing it. And I was doing it well. And I only had to do it for another 29 seconds. 28.. 27..