Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights_ - Alex Hutchinson [5]
The results are no surprise to elite cyclists, runners, and swimmers, who have relied on interval training for decades to achieve peak performance. To break the four-minute mile in 1954, Roger Bannister famously relied on interval sessions of ten 60-second sprints separated by two minutes of rest, because his duties as a medical student on clinical rotation limited his training time to half an hour a day at lunch. Such time constraints are the main reason Gibala advocates HIT, since studies consistently find that lack of time is the top reason that people don’t manage to get the 30 minutes of daily exercise recommended by public health guidelines. “We’re not saying that it’s a panacea that has all the benefits of endurance training,” he says. “But it’s a way that people can get away with less.”
More recent studies have started to piece together exactly how HIT sessions work. A study at the University of Western Ontario compared volunteers who ran four to six 30-second sprints with four minutes’ rest (just like Gibala’s HIT workout for cycling) with another group running steadily for 30 to 60 minutes at a time. After six weeks of training three times a week, both groups made identical gains in endurance and lost similar amounts of fat. In the “long runs” group, the endurance gains came from increases in the amount of blood pumped by the heart; in the HIT group, almost all the gains came from the muscles themselves, which improved their ability to extract oxygen from circulating blood. Since it’s important to have a healthy heart and healthy muscles, this suggests you shouldn’t rely exclusively on HIT workouts. As with cardio and weights, a mixture is best.
High-intensity exercise is generally thought to carry some risks, so sedentary or older people should check with a doctor before trying HIT. Interestingly, though, University of British Columbia researcher Darren Warburton has studied HIT training in cancer and heart disease patients and found that these higher-risk populations can also benefit safely from HIT.
WORKOUTS
The guiding principle of HIT is that the shorter the workout, the higher the intensity you need to reap the benefits. “Basically,” McMaster University’s Martin Gibala says, “you need to get out of your comfort zone.” Start by trying a HIT workout once or twice a week.
The Street-lighter: For a sedentary person who gets winded walking around the block, HIT can be as simple as walking more quickly than usual between two light poles. Then back off, and repeat after you have recovered.
The Classic: Go hard for one minute, then recover (either by slowing down or stopping completely) for one to two minutes. Repeat 10 times. This is a staple workout for a wide range of abilities, suitable for any cardio activity.
The Timesaver: Gibala’s protocol of 30 seconds of all-out cycling four to six times with four minutes rest is the shortest workout shown to be effective. But achieving the necessary intensity outside the lab is extremely challenging, so it’s best suited to experts and those capable of extreme self-punishment.
All these workouts should be preceded by a gentle warm-up of at least 5 to 10 minutes.
There is one catch—the disclaimer at the end of the infomercial, if you will. To cram the benefits of an hour-long workout into a few short minutes, you also have to compress the effort you would have spent. “That’s the trade-off,” Gibala says. “Going all out is uncomfortable. It hurts.” But at least with this approach, it’s over quickly.
Can exercise increase my risk of a heart attack?
Danny Kassap was one of the fittest people in the world when he was felled by a heart attack just several kilometers into the 2008 Berlin marathon. The 25-year-old Canadian marathon star survived thanks to a spectator who immediately began CPR, but a few weeks later, Alexei Cherepanov wasn’t so lucky. The 19-year-old hockey prospect collapsed and died during a game in Russia’s Continental Hockey League. News like that