STUDY: Twelve minutes of exercise a week 'enough to stay fit'... -
Twelve minutes' exercise per week 'enough to stay fit'
Just 12 minutes of intensive exercise per week is enough to improve your health if you are overweight, a study has found.
Four-minute bursts of high-intensity exercise such as running on a treadmill, three times a week are enough to increase fitness, researchers found.
Overweight volunteers who undertook the regime for 10 weeks increased their body's oxygen uptake – a measure of fitness – by 10 per cent and saw small decreases in their blood pressure and glucose levels.
Health guidelines generally state that we should undertake at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 20 minutes of vigorous exercise per week in order to stay healthy.
But the new study suggests that just 12 minutes of high-intensity exercise, spread out across three sessions, could be enough to keep us fit and healthy, researchers said.
The team from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim studied the effects of different exercise regimes on 24 men who were overweight but otherwise healthy.
Three times a week for 10 weeks, the men undertook bouts of "vigorous" exercise, which involved running on a treadmill at a speed which raised their heart rate to 90 per cent of its maximum capacity.
For half of the men the regime involved simple four-minute sessions, three times a week, while the other half completed three sixteen-minute sessions, each of which was divided into four-minute segments.
Despite carrying out different amounts of exercise, the results for the two groups were strikingly similar.
Oxygen uptake – the amount of oxygen the body can use during exercise – increased by 10 per cent in the four-minute group, and by 13 per cent in the sixteen-minute group.
Blood pressure and glucose levels lowered by similar amounts in both groups, but the more intensive sixteen-minute sessions was more effective at lowering cholesterol and body fat.
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