Just six minutes of intense exercise a week can keep people as fit as three hour-long jogs, Canadian researchers report in the June issue of the Journal of Applied Physiology.
Is there a catch? Of course. Those six minutes come from four 30-second bursts of all-out effort with four-minute rests in between each sprint. This "sprint interval training" adds up to three 20-minute sessions a week, says Martin J. Gibala, PhD, associate professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
So if you are wavering out there about whether to do the hill workouts or the track intervals, here is more evidence that these workouts do pay off.
The idea of sprint interval training is at least 70 years old. Elite athletes often train this way. But this elite training technique has only recently come under scientific scrutiny. How well can it work? Gibala and colleagues looked at the effect of just a few training sessions.
They enrolled 18 college students in their study. All were "recreationally active," although none of these 21- to 27-year-old students was engaged in any kind of structured athletic training. All the students practiced using a special stationary bicycle used to test fitness capacity.
After the practice sessions, half the students got two weeks off. The other half did six sessions of sprint interval training over the same two weeks. What happened?
Those who didn't train didn't improve. But just those six sessions of sprint interval training increased the students' endurance capacity by 100%. And tests showed that their muscles were burning oxygen much more efficiently.
If you just want to maintain your health, as the call to arms from Halley indicates needs to be done, then do some speed work.
If you want to improve your running, your performance in any race distance, short or long, you need to do some speed work.
If you would like details on what program to do for your circumstance, please contact me and I can work something out for you.
Happy running!
