New research revealed on a BBC TV Horizon program broadcast in February 2012, suggests it is possible to improve some measures of fitness with just 3 minutes of exercise a week. Medical journalist Dr Michael Mosley, like many people, is not a great fan of exercise for its own sake, and set out to find how little he would need to do to get fit. And he discovered some surprising facts about health benefits of HIT, or High Intensity Training. Challenging Current Thinking
"It goes against everything I was taught in medical school, and everything I have ever read since", gasps Mosley to camera, as he completes a vigorous bout of pedal-ling on a stationary exercise bike while scientists look on. Mosley, who trained as a medical doctor before moving into journalism and broadcasting, introduces the one-hour programme, "The Truth About Exercise", by saying that what he discovered about exercise, thanks to the latest research, has challenged his view, and altered the way he lives his life.
High Intensity Training
HIT is not new, but has come to prominence in recent years as more researchers have looked into and measured its health benefits. There are various forms of HIT, depending on the intensity and duration of the effortful bursts, and your fitness goals. (The HIT in this article is not to be confused with another type of workout also called HIT: a strength-training made popular in the 1970s by Arthur Jones, now practised by many bodybuilders, where you work with weights and perform sets of repetitions to the point of momentary muscle failure.)
Recent HIT research shows, for example, that doing ten one-minute sprints on a stationary exercise bike with about one minute of rest in between, three times a week, is as good for improving muscle as many hours of less strenuous conventional long-term biking.
Professor Martin Gibala and his team at McMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, carried out a study on college students, and discovers HIT delivers the same physical benefits as traditional endurance training, even though it takes considerably less time, and surprisingly, involves doing less exercise.
Types of HIT
In Gibala 's student study, the participants had to pedal at their maximum possible effort level on a specially adapted lab bike. The thinking then was that "all out" was an important part of the HIT method.
But then, in 2010, Gibala and colleagues published another study in The Journal of Physiology, where they showed how a less extreme form of HIT worked just as well for people whose doctors might be a bit worried about them adopting the "all out" method, for instance those who might be older, less fit and overweight.
In that form of HIT, the workout was still beyond the comfort zone of most people (about 95% of maximal heart rate), but was only half of what might be regarded as an "all out" sprint. On the BBC programme, Mosley tries a form of HIT developed by Jamie Timmons, professor of ageing biology at Birmingham University in the UK. In Timmons' form of HIT, the bursts of high intensity are at maximum effort, but of very short duration (20 seconds at a time). Timmons told Mosley, who was doing no weekly exercise at the time, that he could expect to see improvements in a number of measures of health if he did just three minutes of HIT a week, for four weeks.
Simple Program
The HIT program he asked Mosley to follow was quite simple and can be done on a standard exercise bike:- First, you warm up for a couple of minutes with some gentle cycling: then you cycle as fast as you possibly can ("hell for leather", as Mosley describes it) for 20 seconds.
- Then, you cycle gently again for a couple of minutes while you catch your breath, then do another 20 seconds "flat out".
- Then, for a final time, two minutes gentle cycling to catch your breath, followed the third period of 20 seconds at "full throttle".
Mosley said he was somewhat skeptical, but he did as Timmons instructed: he followed this HIT program for four weeks, totaling 12 minutes of pedalling at "full throttle" and 36 minutes at a gentle pace.
