This column appears in the
May 12 issue of The New York Times Magazine, by Gretchen Reynolds.
Exercise science is a fine and
intellectually fascinating thing. But sometimes you just want someone to lay
out guidelines for how to put the newest fitness research into practice.
An article
in the May-June issue of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health &
Fitness Journal does just that. In 12 exercises deploying only body weight,
a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort,
which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about
seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.
“There’s very good evidence” that
high-intensity interval training provides “many of the fitness benefits of
prolonged endurance training but in much less time,” says Chris Jordan, the
director of exercise physiology at the Human Performance Institute in Orlando,
Fla., and co-author of the new article.
Work by scientists at McMaster
University in Hamilton, Ontario, and other institutions shows, for instance,
that even a few minutes of training at an intensity approaching your maximum
capacity produces molecular changes within muscles comparable to those of
several hours of running or bike riding.
Interval training, though,
requires intervals; the extremely intense activity must be intermingled with
brief periods of recovery. In the program outlined by Mr. Jordan and his
colleagues, this recovery is provided in part by a 10-second rest between
exercises. But even more, he says, it’s accomplished by alternating an exercise
that emphasizes the large muscles in the upper body with those in the lower
body. During the intermezzo, the unexercised muscles have a moment to,
metaphorically, catch their breath, which makes the order of the exercises
important.
The exercises should be performed
in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each, while, throughout, the
intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Jordan
says. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is,
after seven minutes, you’re done.
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