The seven-and-a-half-minute (per week) workout
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Regular aerobic exercise helps prevent diabetes. But if you don’t have time for several lengthy workout sessions each week, researchers have come up with a speed-dial approach to diabetes prevention. They have shown that a mere 7.5 minutes per week of high-intensity exercise substantially improved insulin sensitivity in healthy, sedentary people.
The study involved 16 young men who performed two weeks of supervised, high-intensity interval training. The training consisted of four to six 30-second sprints on an exercise bike. The men rested four minutes between each sprint. The total time commitment of each workout session ranged from 17 to 26 minutes, and they burned a mere 250 calories a week from the workouts. The study participants were given an oral glucose test, which measures how the body responds to sugar, before and after the two-week training period. In the later test, the amount of time the men’s blood sugar and blood insulin levels were above normal was reduced by 12% and 37%, respectively.
The authors of the study, from Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, say they think the brief workout program works so well on insulin because it involves large muscle groups. Skeletal muscle is the major tissue responsible for the uptake of glucose following a meal. The kind of muscle contractions and breakdown of muscle fibers that occurs in high-intensity interval training seem to result in changes in muscle insulin sensitivity.
‘While regular exercise training represents one of the most powerful strategies to reduce the development of metabolic disease in healthy adults, most adults fail to meet current guidelines,’ the authors wrote. High-intensity interval training, such as running up the stairs a few times twice a week, is ‘a preventative intervention that could logically be implemented as an early strategy to prevent age-related development of cardiovascular disease.’
The study is published this week in the journal BMC Endocrine Disorders.
-- Shari Roan