Shorter, Harder Exercise Works, Too

Ivanhoe Newswire
Wednesday, October 4, 2006; 12:00 AM

(Ivanhoe Newswire) -- Don't have an hour a day to work out? Then a new study has the answer for you: Forget the traditional walk on the treadmill and opt for short-burst, high-intensity exercise instead.

Researchers out of Hamilton, Ontario, compared healthy young men who participated in the two different types of exercise find both groups increased their fitness levels to similar degrees.

The study involved 16 men who were assigned to either six sessions of 90 minutes to 120 minutes of continuous cycling on an exercise bike (endurance training, or ET) or six shorter sessions during which the men pedaled full out for 30 seconds, followed by four minute rest periods, repeating the cycle four to six times (sprint-interval training, or SIT). Over two weeks, the ET exercisers clocked about 10.5 hours of exercise, vs. just 2.5 hours in the SIT group.

While the authors wouldn't recommend SIT for heart patients -- and emphasize anyone starting an exercise program should check with their doctor first -- they believe short burst, intense workouts like the one they studied could go a long way toward introducing exercise into the lives of busy people.

"Given the large difference in training volume, these data demonstrate that SIT is a time-efficient strategy to induce rapid adaptations in skeletal muscle and exercise performance that are comparable to ET in young active men," they write.

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SOURCE: Journal of Physiology, 2006;575:901-911