How Much Exercise is Enough?

 

If you love going to the gym and could think of no better way to spend a sunny Saturday afternoon than working out, this article is not for you. For the rest of us, still trying to fit exercise into our daily schedule, read on!

How does exercising only a few minutes a day sound? Probably, too good to be true. Yet, research, at the University of Nottingham and Bath in England, says you can.

No need to purchase any fancy exercise equipment. I do it in my bedroom in less time than it takes to brew a decent cup of coffee. Best of all, it’s free.

How to Exercise Smarter, Not Harder

The system is called High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT). It’s similar to interval training, but better. With HIIT, you only have to do three thirty-second bursts of high intensity exercise. And, no, that’s not a typo: HIIT advocates thirty seconds not minutes of movement. Better yet, you only need to do this three times a week!

The key is the movement must be intense. You must push yourself to about 85% of your maximum heart rate; for most of us that means give it your all, so HIIT is not recommended for folks with heart issues. And if you haven’t exercised in a while, check in with your doctor.

Benefits of Shorter Intense Exercise

After following a HIIT exercise program, if you can call less than ten minutes a week a program, participants experienced reduced glucose and insulin levels. Additionally, HIIT has been shown to improve aerobic fitness. However, as with almost anything, people’s bodies respond differently. I like to measure my heart health to see how a routine is affecting me.

To measure heart health, I use a fast, easy method by checking my heart rate before getting out of bed. If after a few weeks of HIIT my resting rate decreases, then I’ll continue to pant and jump around like crazy for brief stints—no matter how nuts the neighbors think I am.


Conclusion

If you’re trying out for the Olympic swim team or want to build six-pack abs, then a couple of minutes of high impact movement a few days a week won’t cut it. But if you don’t like exercise and find it difficult to stick with a program, then HIIT might provide you with a level a fitness you didn’t have before. Science backs this up. For example, here are few findings from the National Center for Biotechnology Information:

• “This novel time-efficient training paradigm can be used as a strategy to reduce metabolic risk factors in young and middle aged sedentary populations who otherwise would not adhere to time consuming traditional aerobic exercise regimes.”
• “Recently an extremely low volume high-intensity interval training paradigm (HIT), consisting of no more than 7.5 minutes of exercise per week, has been proposed as a novel, time-efficient exercise regime for improving aerobic fitness [4,14]. We speculated that it should be possible to substantially improve insulin action using HIT despite a negligible contribution to total energy expenditure as this training model would substantially reduce muscle glycogen stores.”

I try to live by the adage “Work smarter, not harder”, not always successfully, but I try. And HIIT is definitely working smarter.