According to a recent study, six minutes of exercise a week ‘is as good as six hours’ — if it’s an intense six minutes:
Just six minutes of intense exercise a week does as much to improve a person’s fitness as a regime of six hours, according to a study.Moderately healthy men and women could cut their workouts from two hours a day, three times a week, to just two minutes a day and still achieve the same results, claim medical researchers.
I’m not surprised by the finding; I’m surprised that academics even considered it.
More detail:
The two-minute workout requires cycling furiously on a stationary bike in four 30-second bursts. Professor Martin Gibala, the author of the study, said: “The whole excuse that ‘I don’t have enough time to exercise’ is directly challenged by these findings. This has the potential to change the way we think about keeping fit.“We have shown that a person can get the same benefits in fitness and health in a much shorter period if they are willing to endure the discomfort of high-intensity activity.”
The study, published in this month’s Journal of Applied Physiology, involved 23 men and women aged between 25 and 35 who were tested to see how long it took them to cycle 18.6 miles. The subjects, who all did some form of regular moderate exercise, were then given varying exercise programmes three times a week.
The first group cycled for two hours a day at a moderate pace. The second group biked harder for 10 minutes a day in 60-second bursts. The last group cycled at an intense sprint for two minutes in 30-second bursts, with four minutes of rest in between each sprint.
At the end of the two weeks each of the three groups was asked to repeat the 18.6 mile cycling test. Every subject was found to have improved to the same degree. Further tests showed that the rate at which the subjects’ muscles were able to absorb oxygen also improved to the same level.
The key findings in terms of overall health showed that the two-minute workout produced the same muscle enzymes — essential for the prevention of type 2 diabetes — as riding 10 times as long.