This column appears in the May 12 issue of The New
York Times Magazine.
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.
A version of this article appears in print on 05/12/2013, on page MM20 of the NewYork edition with the headline: The Scientific 7-Minute Workout.
Newport Beach MedSpa • http://www.newportbeachmedspa.com/
2131 Westcliff Drive #101 Newport Beach, CA 92660
Phone: (949)-631-2800 | Fax: (949) 631-2808
4341 Birch Street Suite 101 Newport Beach, CA 92660
Phone: (949) 756-8633 | Fax: (949) 756-8634
|
No comments:
Post a Comment