I’ve done THREE MINUTES of exercise a week for two years and never been fitter!

He was one of the first people to try ‘high-intensity’ exercise — and initially he scoffed. Now Vince says it’s changed his life

Surely,’ asked radio presenter Jeremy Vine, ‘this is just exercise for lazy people?’ I’d just been explaining my fitness regimen to him. He didn’t sound impressed. Three times a week, I head to the gym, jump on an exercise bike and spend a minute — yes, 60 seconds — pedalling as hard as I can. And that’s all the exercise I ever do. It’s called high-intensity training, or HIT. It’s at the cutting edge of scientific research and is no gimmick, insist experts.

Indeed, there have been more than 200 studies over the past ten years which seem to show that three minutes of intense exercise every week dramatically lessens your risk of falling victim to a long list of potentially life-limiting or fatal conditions, such as heart disease, stroke, diabetes, blindness and some cancers.

HIT does, however, fly in the face of official advice, which recommends we do 150 minutes’ exercise every week if it’s ‘moderately’ intense (such as brisk walking) or 75 minutes a week of more vigorous exercise, such as running.

It won’t surprise you to learn that more than 80 per cent of us fall short of that target. But three minutes a week? Wouldn’t that be a bit more achievable?

I first wrote about HIT in Good Health in February 2013. Back then, I embarked on an experiment. Overweight and unfit, I tried four weeks on a HIT regimen. Then I had six weeks off, doing no exercise at all (in order to bring my fitness level back towards where I’d started). Finally, I did a month of the Government’s approved exercise schedule.

The results of my experiments astonished me. Indeed, the improvements to my fitness after four weeks of HIT were so impressive that Dr Tom Crisp, the Bupa sports physician who talked me through the fitness readings and who was something of a HIT sceptic, was as amazed as I was.

WHEN it came to physical fitness, I’d been in the bottom 30 per cent of the population, but my readings showed I was now fitter than most men of my age. ‘I’d have expected little or no change,’ Dr Crisp told me. And that, remember, was after a mere 12 minutes of intense exercise over a month.

There was further good news: my blood pressure dropped noticeably, too — going from 123/79 to 109/70. ‘Another fantastic improvement,’ said Dr Crisp.

When I forced myself through the ‘official’ exercise regimen, my blood pressure result wasn’t any better than the result that HIT gave me — and my fitness, though better, wasn’t anywhere close to justifying the massive amount of extra effort involved. Over the four weeks, one regimen involved a mere 12 minutes of intense exercise. The other one, five hours.

There and then, I decided that HIT was for me. I would stick with it.

And, 2½ years on, I have kept it up. That in itself is amazing — because I do not enjoy exercise.

At school, I was always the last boy to be picked for the team. I grew up with a real dislike of sport, which carried on into adult life. So the idea of my doing either 75 or 150 minutes’ exercise a week is unthinkable, even if I had the time. But the idea of doing 150 minutes a year? Well, that’s more like it!

The question is: what difference has it made to my health?

But first a quick phone call to my gym. My aim has always been to do my HIT there three times a week. I’m sure I’ve gone three times a week.

‘Hello, Miss Gym Manager. Please could you check how many times I have been to the gym over the past 2½ years?’

It turns out that I have, on average, been 1.8 times per week. rather less than the two to three times per week I was advised to do by Dr Jamie Timmons, now professor of precision medicine at King’s College, london. One of the world’s leading authorities on HIT, he had guided me through the science at the start.

So how had I fared since? A few weeks ago, Professor Timmons sent me to meet researcher Dr Niels Vollaard, at Bath university, who put me through my paces as well as a scan to measure the percentage of fat in my body.

And the results were . . . wonderful. Normally, one would expect a middle-aged man’s blood pressure and weight to rise as he gets older. But my blood pressure — which dropped when I first took up HIT — has continued to drop: from 123/79 in December 2012 to 106/67 now. Also, in the 2½ years since I started HIT, I’ve lost 7kg, or more than 15lb. In fact, I weigh less today, aged 46, than in my early 30s.

My physical fitness — defined by a measurement known as VO2 Max, a gauge of how efficiently your heart and lungs take oxygen from the outside world and delivers it to your muscles — moved from 31.7 to 34.9 after four weeks of HIT in 2013. Now it’s even better, at 39.9. And your VO2 Max matters. The higher your reading, the lower your risk of cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease and certain cancers. More impressively for the boy who hated Pe lessons, my VO2 Max reading means I am fitter than 80 per cent of men my age. ‘For a man of your age, you’d typically expect it to fall by about two points in 2½ years,’ says Professor Timmons. I have, in effect, halted the tide of time, he says.

On this occasion, I’d also had my glucose tolerance measured; this was done by force-feeding me a super- sweet drink and then measuring my blood sugar over the following two hours.

This is important: you want your body to remove sugar from your blood stream as quickly as it can — the longer it is there, the more damage it can do to vital organs.

My result showed that after just two hours, the excess sugar had been entirely eliminated from my blood.

Commenting on my latest results, Professor Timmons says: ‘you can’t get away from it. your figures are striking and clear. your blood pressure and glucose tolerance would be good for a 25-year-old.’

My body fat ratio, at 22 per cent, is also ‘a figure you’d expect to see in somebody in their 20s’. And all of this on the back of less than four hours’ intense cycling in 2½ years!

Of course, my experiment was not done under lab conditionst.

HOW does HIT work? It’s not known for certain, but one theory is that it protects the body’s small blood vessels from high blood sugar levels (which can lead to diabetes), because intense muscle contractions are highly efficient at breaking down glucose stores in the muscle.

The idea is that by removing these stores of glucose, you make way for fresh glucose to be deposited from the bloodstream.

Ah, I hear the naysayers ask, but is HIT safe? After all, didn’t the broadcaster Andrew Marr attribute his stroke to HIT?

Professor Timmons says that the evidence does not support the claim that HIT is risky.

He says it does not sound like Marr was following a properly designed HIT regimen (he was using a rowing machine, against advice because the movement on an exercise bike is much more restricted, meaning you’re less likely to strain a muscle or, more seriously, cause a rupture).

Professor Timmons adds of Marr: ‘He’d had a couple of mini-strokes in the past, which are the clearest indication of future risk. His stroke could just as easily have happened while he was asleep.’

‘you cannot say there is no risk,’ the professor adds, ‘ but HIT studies have specifically been carried out on diabetes patients, unfit and overweight men and women, and even people recovering from recent heart attacks, and there have been no fatalities.

‘We’re not saying HIT is better than traditional exercise. But we’re saying it’s at least as good — and over a shorter period of time.’

And crucially, of course, people are much more likely to keep doing it.

Jeremy Vine may be right. Perhaps HIT is exercise for lazy people.

But they — we — are the people who need to do more exercise; the non-lazy ones are already doing it.

Best of all, it really works.