Surprising Benefits of Brief, Intense Exercise

Exercise builds the body, clears the mind and helps us live longer. We know all that. A good workout can even be enjoyable, flooding the brain with feel-good chemicals. The list goes on: improving sleep, helping battle depression, even maybe boosting general happiness.

But we humans have an unsurpassed capacity for finding excuses not to do the things that are good for us. Often we blame our perceived lack of time.

And so I wondered: How long must we exercise to actually improve health?

You’ll be surprised to learn how effective it can be to climb a few stairs now and then, whether it be your first steps in a fitness program or to complement an existing regime. Image: Pixabay/Free-Photos

It’s a question that motivates researchers like Martin Gibala, a professor in the department of kinesiology at McMaster University, to do creative investigations of utterly brief exercise schemes. Or, in his most recent study, a “workout” you can do in a few minutes wherever stairs are found.

Gibala and his colleagues got some otherwise sedentary young adults to “vigorously” climb three flights of stairs, three times a day (with hours between the efforts), thrice weekly. After six weeks, compared to a control group that didn’t exercise, the stair climbers saw a 5 percent increase in cardiorespiratory fitness, as measured by peak oxygen uptake. Their legs grew 12 percent more powerful.

“This study is a reminder of the potential benefits of brief bouts of physical activity that can be done anywhere without the need for specialized equipment,” Gibala told me. Think of it as an exercise snack, he says, something to take between workouts.

The results, published Jan. 16 in the journal Applied Physiology, Nutrition, and Metabolism, add to a growing body of research showing remarkable benefits from very short-duration, high-intensity interval training that — as we’ll see below — people don’t always hate so much.

Got a Minute?

Interval training is nothing new. Runners have done it since before shoes had swooshes. A classic example: eight all-out sprints around the track with a two-minute recovery between each repetition. For an average in-shape runner, that could take 30 minutes to complete (quite a bit more for the rest of us). Who’s got time for that?

Unless you’re trying to catch Usain Bolt, you don’t need to work nearly that long to see significant health…