From "Can 4 Seconds of Exercise Make a Difference?" (NYT).
December 30, 2020
"In what is probably the definitive word on how little exercise we can get away with, a new study finds that a mere four seconds of intense intervals, repeated until they amount to about a minute of total exertion..."
"... lead to rapid and meaningful improvements in strength, fitness and general physical performance among middle-aged and older adults.... Ed Coyle, an exercise physiologist at the University of Texas in Austin, and his graduate assistant Jakob Allen suspected that even 20-second spurts, performed intensely, might exceed some exercisers’ tolerance. So, he decided to start looking for the shortest possible interval that was still effective.... [Volunteers aged 50 to 68] sprinted for four seconds, with Dr. Allen calling out a second-by-second countdown, followed by 56 seconds of rest, repeating that sequence 15 times, for a total of 60 seconds of intervals.
Over two months, though, the riders’ rest periods declined to 26 seconds and they increased their total number of sprints to 30 per session.
At the end of eight weeks, the scientists retested everyone and found substantial differences. On average, riders had increased their fitness by about 10 percent, gained considerable muscle mass and strength in their legs, reduced the stiffness of their arteries and outperformed their previous selves in activities of daily living, all from about three to six minutes a week of actual exercise."
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15 comments:
Insert joke here about four seconds of intense sex.
THEOLDMAN
You can't get a good ab workout in under six minutes. Everyone knows this.
Interesting, but this result does not surprise me, and what would be even more interesting is to compare these results against the “10,000 steps” types who walk exclusively.
I would expect more cardiopulmonary benefits for the walkers, but more muscle toning and development benefits in the HIIT group.
We need more of this kind of pioneering research.
So if we accept that as little as 6-7 minutes per week, of sufficiently intense exercise, is enough to remake and improve our bodies and our health in measurable ways, in just a few weeks ... our bodies really are amazing and dynamic “machines” that respond quickly and decisively to the things we put inside them, and how we use them, every single day.
You can actually improve your health a little bit today, this week, this month. Measurably.
The flip side is: eating lousy processed food and sitting all day is not just bad for you long-term, it’s bad for you today.
I’m not sure enough people fully get that. Our health is a very dynamic thing that responds to changes pretty quickly. Some changes twke longer of course, like building new capillaries and improving heart and lung capacity, muscle development, etc. But increasing the oxygen in your blood, eating better food, hydration, these we can do today for incremental and noticeable improvements today.
I read somewhere that climbing four flights of stairs in 40 seconds is a good measure of your cardiovascular fitness.
I've been doing it every day for about a month now. Try it.
On another note, my family doctor, who is a triathlete, told me to do something every day that gets your heartbeat up and gets you out of breath.
This is particularly interesting to me, since I’m performing a similar experiment.
Short backstory, I ran a lot last year (300 kilometers in September or about an hour a day).
My current workout routine is much shorter, but as intense as possible,
I simply do one set of as many pull-ups as I possibly can. My “standard” is 12, sometimes I can almost do 14.
I haven’t actually timed myself, but about a minute total sounds right. It definitely produces a sustained cardiovascular response, and it’s impossible to tell myself I don’t have enough time.
It isn't so much a study of how little exercise we can "get away with", so much as it is about the minimum for measurable improvement. Some amount of improvement is better than none, but still very far from optimal even for a person wanting to do the least exertion possible for the most benefit.
My teenage sons and I do Taekwondo, and the standard warmup when we start a class is 100/100/100: that's 100 jumping jacks, 100 crunches, and 100 pushups. The requirement is that they must be done in under 3 minutes. Anyone has time for that in their day.
I've been spin-biking for over 30 years but man, is it wreaking havoc with my IT bands now...constant pain. Everything comes at a price.
Interval training was a thing in the 70s. But 4 sec wow. A new excuse to slack off!
Our trainer noted this recently in a case of people badly out of shape need to start with minimal exercises.
Also, he mention that people who have been immobilized or have limbs that have been immobilized for some time (e.g. several days post-op) will lose muscle strength rabidly.
Oops rabidly....ha ha
Should be "rapidly"
Does anyone remember the strange contraption that was advertised in magazines and newspapers a number of years back?
Sort of like a recumbent bike with levers and such...it looked kind of "Olde Tyme."
It was really expensive...thousands of dollars.
The claim was you could use it to exercise once a day for only a minute of so, and that was all you'd need.
Maybe they were on to something...
Hike up mtn trails daily - min 3 miles or until my calves are having a cow.
I was on a Zoom yesterday with an ex pro cyclist who is now an elite coach. Due to advances in training and data analysis riders can get the same benefit in 50-60% of the time from when he raced.
Waiting for 29 seconds on a piece of exercise equipment after an intense effort is more than 0 seconds of exercise.
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