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According to a number of pretty important people, most of whom are experts in the field of medicine, sitting is the new smoking. Even though it’s nowhere near as harmful by itself, hours spent sitting without any form of exercise at some point during the day can have some pretty nasty health detriments.
Other than the regular dangers posed by a total lack of exercise, sitting can be related to anything from an increased risk of cardiovascular disease to a higher chance of developing certain types of cancer. For short, you need to exercise in order to maintain a healthy body or at least to reduce the chances of developing a few conditions that are at least unpleasant.
One minute exercise
Of course, the best way to go about your life is to exercise every day, at least for a little bit. But when it comes to exercising, you can’t really do just a little, can you? You do need to exercise enough for it to actually matter, right? Well, it turns out that you might actually only need to exercise for very little every day and it will still matter.
There’s this new exercise technique which has garnered a lot of attention on the internet, even though some have been quite skeptical on whether it actually works or not. But according to a new study from the McMaster University, the one minute workout has surprising health benefits.
So what is this one minute workout, anyway? Well, it actually takes more than just one minute, as the one minute is comprised exclusively of intense exercise. It actually takes ten minutes overall, with three all-out sessions of cycling comprised of 20 seconds each, a two minute warm-up, two minutes of easy cycling between the hard sprints, and three minutes of increasingly slower cycling as cool-down.
Twenty-seven sedentary men
It might seem like that’s not enough, even though all that intense exercise might initially overexert people not used to such intense workout. So what did the study consist of, anyway? Well, according to the published paper, the study showed that the one minute workout was equivalent to 45 minutes of moderate exercise, so let’s see how the researchers discovered that.
First of all, the team recruited a sample of 27 sedentary men. They were divided into three groups, with some assigned to the control group which didn’t exercise at all, some to the regular exercise group, and the others to the intense workout group. They then performed their assigned exercises for twelve weeks during three weekly sessions.
Even though further studies have to be performed in order to confirm the accuracy of the study, the results were pretty clear. The one minute intense workout was just as effective as the 45 minutes of moderate exercise. This proves that you actually have the time to work out enough to keep healthy regardless of how little free time you actually have. Ten minutes are just minutes, after all.
Image source: Wikimedia
