Clever trick that gets you fit in minutes
Yes really — and, as this leading expert reveals, even beginners could benefit
REGULAR physical activity makes you look and feel better and reduces your chance of developing conditions such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes and even cancer.
It’s also one of the best ways to push back the effects of ageing.
Yet so few of us do it: many are too intimidated or convince themselves they haven’t enough time to squeeze a workout into their busy day, let alone get near the official advice of 150 minutes of moderate activity a week.
But there is a proven way to get fit in just a few minutes each day (or even just three times a week), with high intensity interval training (HIIT).
Put very simply, you just have to push yourself very hard for as little as 20 seconds, ease off to catch your breath, then push yourself hard again.
Rather than exercising steadily for as long as possible (a 45-minute aerobics class or a one-hour bike ride), your workout is broken into short intervals of hard work, rest, hard work, rest. This pattern has a far greater impact on your health and fitness, so you can spend a far shorter amount of time doing it.
That’s it. And it’s not just for the incredibly fit who strut to the gym in Lycra. It can be done at home, on a walk, in the pool or on a bike ride. You can do it even if you’re overweight or you’ve never done any exercise before.
It could be as simple as walking at a steady pace for three minutes, and then increasing your effort for another three minutes before returning to a lighter intensity again, keeping up this pattern for 30 minutes (for other examples, see the panel below). Its power is miraculous. As a professor of exercise physiology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, I’ve spent decades studying the health benefits of interval training. I’m convinced this is the closest we have come to an ‘exercise pill’ — freely available to everyone.
My studies have shown you can get the same health benefits of nearly an hour of steady aerobic exercise with just a single minute of hard exercising.
ADMITTEDLY, many studies have shown the harder and faster you push yourself during intervals, the more effective it is and the less time you need to exercise.
But if face-reddening effort doesn’t appeal, you will still gain the benefits if you just up your effort a little — push yourself for 30 or 60 seconds, then return to your normal pace. You may have to keep repeating the intervals for 20 minutes, while if you went all out you’d be done in ten. Even interval walking appears to produce better health results than walking at a steady pace. As long as you vary the intensity, you’ll derive proportionally more benefit from your workout than if you take things slowly. Top athletes have been doing it for decades. Sebastian Coe credited it for his Olympic running success in the Seventies.
But despite growing evidence of its health benefits, policy-makers have dismissed interval training as too complicated and arduous for non-athletes.
I disagree. Even someone recovering from an operation will often find themselves interval training accidentally. They may walk a bit, rest, then walk a bit more. Interval training can be adapted for anyone: whatever kind of activity you do, just push hard for as long as is comfortable, back off, then push hard again. Find a hill, walk up it as fast as you can, turn and walk slowly down until your breathing is back to normal, then turn around and walk fast uphill again. Try it at home going up and down the stairs. Training like this is less painful. When you start to exercise, it can be tough to maintain a strenuous pace. But the intermittent nature of the exertion in interval training means you get breaks from the toughest part of the exercise, which allows you to recover. Psychologically, intervals also keep you engaged, which makes the time feel as though it’s going faster than it is.
Studies show you get fitter faster, so you begin to enjoy it sooner.
CAN IT BE RISKY TO PUSH MYSELF HARD?
ONE of the first things people ask about HIIT is whether it can be dangerous. The bottom line is that people who do high intensity exercise are more likely to live longer and have fewer heart attacks than sedentary people, but the studies show your risk of a sudden heart attack is increased for a short time during and soon after vigorous exercise.
According to a 2015 paper by the American College of Sports Medicine, the elevated risk applies to all (not just people with heart disease), but the risk is low — at one per 1.42 million hours of exercise. Nevertheless, that’s a 1% higher risk than you may have sitting doing nothing. The heart attack risk increases slightly with age and the vigorousness of the exercise, but interval training makes you more fit. As part of the ageing process, our hearts grow less able to pump and our blood vessels grow stiffer, diminishing their capacity to carry blood. But interval training can substantially slow, and even reverse, this age-related decline. It dramatically improves the way the heart takes up and pumps out oxygen. The key lies in the fact that interval training allows you to push your physical limits, but just for a very short time. During an intense session, your heart might pump five times as much blood as it does when you’re at rest.
Do this repeatedly and your heart muscle rapidly gets stronger and better able to pump, and your blood vessels become more pliable. Interval training has been shown to give double the pliability of blood vessels compared with ordinary continuous exercise.
These changes mean that at rest, your heart doesn’t have to work as hard and over the long term, this reduces the likelihood of heart attack and stroke. Your risk drops the more exercise you do.
And when you push yourself hard, you work your body close to its maximum capacity, triggering metabolic changes that mean you continue to reap the benefits hours after your workout.
HOW INTENSELY SHOULD I EXERCISE?
ALL the studies are beginning to show that intensity is more important than duration. It is more time efficient to exercise hard, in intervals, for a short time than it is to exercise at an easy pace for a long time. In our studies, we urged participants to aim for maximum intensity, and we had team mates shouting ‘Go! Go! Go!’ to encourage them to keep it up for a full minute. This super-human endeavour provides the best results in the shortest time possible.
However, intensity is an individual thing, and it is important to factor your age and fitness levels into how hard you push things.
Aim to get out of your comfort zone for the duration of the interval. To help you work out what level this means:
LIGHT intensity exercise is where you could hold this pace easily and talking is easy (this is your ‘rest and recovery mode’).
MODERATE intensity exercise is where you need to breathe more deeply, but can still talk.
HEAVY intensity exercise is where you are breathing hard and talking becomes difficult.
AS YOU get near maximum intensity, you may be gasping for breath and unable to speak.
MAXIMUM intensity is ‘sprint away from danger’ pace. MEDICAL DISCLAIMER: If you have health concerns, check with a doctor before starting or changing an exercise routine.
THE One Minute Workout by Martin Gibala has just been published by Vermilion.