Fitness

A Minute of Hard Exercise Pays-Off 45 Minutes of Moderate Workout

Never ask a weight-loss-seeking person to exercise, since this is the hardest thing for them on the planet to do. Keeping aside the fitness freak population,… Melisa Silver - May 9, 2016

Never ask a weight-loss-seeking person to exercise, since this is the hardest thing for them on the planet to do. Keeping aside the fitness freak population, as well as the gamer and athletes, normal people like you and me would think a hundred times before moving our rears from the sofa to get up and exercise.

A normal person who has a routine of 8-9 hours of job 6 days a week won’t give exercise a second thought. After all, in this busy routine, incorporating merely an hour of workout seems to be near to impossible (we won’t do that even if we had a couple of hours free).

Well, for all those who want to skip and flee away from this drastic part of weight loss, latest research has bought you some really awesome breaking news. A study finds that merely 60 seconds of hard work out can pay off 45 minutes of moderate exercise. Well, now that is something really worth a long study and thorough research.

Wait, so does that mean while most of us were off in tiring ourselves out for jogging for 45 minutes straights, some genius minds actually figured out that those 44 minutes could have been saved if we would have surveyed the internet before? You are right!

Study authors from the McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario conducted this research on a concept which is known as ‘interval training’. If you are a sports person, you might be well aware of this fact. And for those who aren’t interval training is actually a brief yet intense period of aggressive exercise, which the ones doing it describes as ‘extremely draining’. So in case, you are facing trouble in fitting those 45 minutes into your routine, spare 60 seconds instead and work out as intensely as you can.

Interval training works by brief periods of aggressive exercise, followed by sometimes reserved for rest or light activities, and then returning to the interval part. Such kind of activity is believed to boost one’s power and speed.

Actually, there is also some amount of mind game that is associated with this kind of training. Since you need to spare merely 60 seconds from a whole of 24 hours, you eventually boost up in expending the max of your energy into it. And the kind of intense workout that is performed during this interval makes you think that you have carried out enough of the activity all through the day.

The same study authors who have conducted this utterly useful and latest study, have also previously tested the use of interval training sessions that last for 10 minutes, 9, 8, and so on. However, none of them got any scientific backing.

This time, the scientists put their efforts into discovering the effects of super-short and aggressive periods of exercise on human health.

The study involved 25 such male participants who were out of shape. Their waist measurement was recorded, along with their initial aerobic fitness, as well as the capability of their body to make use of insulin so as to regulate sugar levels in their blood. Muscle biopsy of these participants was performed as the scientists wanted to assess how well their muscles work at the cellular level.

These participants were divided into three categories: One of them was required to transform nothing regarding the current status of their activities. They performed no routine exercise. This category was named as the ‘controls’. The second category was assigned a typical strengthening-exercise routine that consisted of stationery bicycle riding in the lab for about 45 minutes at a moderate speed, with a three-minute cooldown and two-minute warm-up session. The third category was given the most useful yet the shortest workout of all time, the ‘interval training’.

As the study describes that, specifically, the volunteers warmed up for two minutes on stationary bicycles, then pedaled as hard as possible for 20 seconds; rode at a very slow pace for two minutes, sprinted all-out again for 20 seconds; recovered with slow riding for another two minutes; pedaled all-out for a final 20 seconds; then cooled down for three minutes. The entire workout lasted 10 minutes, with only one minute of that time being strenuous.

The control group manifested no health improvements of course. However, the other two categories underwent specific health enhancements, the effects of none of which were superior to the other. However, the only difference is that of the ‘time duration’.

REFERENCES:

  1. Study finds that 1 minute of exercising really hard is the equivalent of 45 minutes of moderate exercise
  2. 1 Minute of All-Out Exercise May Have Benefits of 45 Minutes of Moderate Exertion
Advertisement