Daily Times

ISLAMABAD: If you put off exercise due to time constraints, then you may need to find another excuse. A new study suggests just 1 minute of vigorous exercise three times weekly can benefit health just as much as longer, conventional endurance training.

Researchers found subjects who engaged in 1 minute of intense cycling three times a week showed significant health benefits. Lead author Martin Gibala, professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, and colleagues recently published their findings in the journal PLOS One.

It is no secret that exercise is good for health, reducing the risks of obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart disease, and a wealth of other conditions.

The 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommend that adults engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic exercise each week, or a combination of the two. However, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), less than half of adults in the United States meet these guidelines.

While the reasons for not exercising vary, “lack of time” is one of the most common, especially with Americans’ increasingly busy lifestyles.

But the new research from Prof. Gibala and colleagues challenges this excuse, after finding just short bursts of intense exercise are just as beneficial as longer endurance training.

In a previous study, the researchers found that sprint interval training (SIT) produced significant health benefits.

This 10-minute training program included three 20-second “all-out” cycle sprints, performed in between 2 minutes of low-intensity cycling. The program also included a 2-minute warm-up and a 3-minute cool down.
“This is a very time-efficient workout strategy,” notes Prof. Gibala. “Brief bursts of intense exercise are remarkably effective.” For the new study, the team compared the SIT program with a moderate-intensity continuous training (MICT) program. This 50-minute program included a 2-minute warm-up, followed by 45 minutes of continuous cycling at a moderate pace, and a 3-minute cool down.

The researchers enrolled 27 sedentary men to their study, all of whom were matched for age, body mass index (BMI), and VO2 peak – a measure of the maximum rate of oxygen consumption during aerobic exercise.

Some of the men were required to engage in three weekly sessions of either SIT or MICT for 12 weeks, while the remaining men were assigned to a control group that did not exercise.

At the end of the 12-week training period, the researchers found that both the SIT and MICT groups experienced similar health benefits from their exercise regimes, compared with the control group.