BBC News - Can three minutes of exercise a week help make you fit?
A few relatively short bursts of intense exercise, amounting to only a few minutes a week, can deliver many of the health and fitness benefits of hours of conventional exercise, according to new research, says Dr Michael Mosley. But how much benefit you get from either may well depend on your genes.
Well, just one minute, three times a week. Yes, you read that correctly.
Three minutes a week. Those three minutes can be split into six bursts of 30 seconds over the week, or nine bursts of 20 seconds. But they must be totally full-on.
So-called High Intensive Training (HIT) has been bubbling around for a number of years — since at least 2005, when ground-breaking researchers at McMaster University in Canada referred to it as 'sprint interval training'.
But now, argue its proponents, it's on the verge of becoming mainstream thinking.
There have been more than a dozen published studies into HIT's benefits; several of them, including one of 29 people in the European Journal of Applied Physiology last year, suggested that it substantially improves cardiovascular fitness and reduces the risk factors for type 2 diabetes.
British researcher Dr Jamie Timmons, professor of systems biology at Loughborough University, is at the forefront of research into HIT, leading a clinical trial of 300 overweight volunteers to help establish its benefits.
His results may, in time, fundamentally change the exercise advice doled out by governments worldwide.
How does HIT work? Dr Timmons says no one knows for certain . . . yet.
'We've got enough independent evidence, from different labs, to say this happens. Now we're trying to establish why.'
http://www.dailymail...hange-life.html
Here's a very interesting PBS program from a week ago about fasting by the same guy pictured above:
Michael Mosley | Eat, Fast and Live Longer with Michael Mosley
Edited by Rogerdodger, 11 April 2013 - 12:05 AM.