Four-minute burst of exercise could stop you ageing

CYCLING at full pelt for just four minutes at a time may be able to stop the ageing process.

Researchers say short bursts of super-intense exercise, used in gym spinning classes, reverse damage to cells that decline over the years.

Their study contradicts the idea that long exercise sessions work best. The scientists concluded that just four minutes of all- out cycling, followed by three easier minutes, are needed 12 times a week, along with another 90 minutes walking on a treadmill.

This interval training works better than longer cycling sessions and weightlifting to halt the damage to the cells’ ‘ batteries’ or mitochondria. Fixing DNA defects in mitochondria is believed to help stave off diseases of old age such as heart failure and cancer.

Researchers at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota found that interval sessions also improve fitness, cut body fat and ward off diabetes. They signed up 72 men and women aged both 18 to 30 and 65 to 80 for highintensity training, resistance training with weights and combined training with longer bouts of cycling and less weights.

In good news for time-poor office workers, senior author Dr Sreekumaran Nair concluded that short bursts were the best. ‘Based on everything we know, there’s no substitute for these exercise programmes when it comes to delaying the ageing process,’ he said. ‘These things we are seeing cannot be done by any medicine.’

Four minutes cycling at close to maximum effort, before collapsing red- faced on the handlebars, leaves the resting metabolic rate elevated for longer after exercise.

The latest study shows it works particularly well in causing cells to make more proteins for their energy-producing mitochondria. This ability is lost through ageing.

Published in the journal Cell Metabolism, the study took biopsies from the thigh muscles of participants and compared the molecular makeup of the cells to samples from sedentary volunteers.

The younger volunteers in the interval training group saw a 49 per cent increase in their mito- chondrial capacity, and the older volunteers saw an even more dramatic 69 per cent uplift.

The interval cycling sessions were better for stopping ageing than resistance training, involving lower and upper body weightlifting.

It also beat five days a week of cycling for half an hour at a lower intensity, plus four days of limited weightlifting. However, interval training was less effective at improving muscle strength. Dr Nair, whose participants did not regularly exercise before joining the study, said: ‘If people have to pick one exercise, I would recommend high- intensity interval training, but I think it would be more beneficial if they could do three to four days of interval training and then a couple days of strength training.’

The team hope a drug could be developed to mimic the effects of exercise in warding off old age.

‘Can’t be done by any medicine’