The Rise of the One Minute Workout

NY Times   In an article under his byline for Sports Illustrated in December 1960, “The Soft American,” President-elect John F. Kennedy lamented the state of the nation’s fitness. As president he exhorted citizens to plunge into activities like 50-mile hikes.

As anyone sitting quietly and reading this article probably knows, that message did not resonate with most Americans. And these days, a majority get no planned exercise at all.

So at the recent annual meeting of the American College of Sports Medicine, one of the hottest topics was not how much exercise Americans should be completing, but how little.[...]

In the past, formal recommendations have called for a substantial amount of regular exercise. For example, published guidelines from the Health and Human Services Department in 2008 suggested 150 minutes of moderate exercise per week — the equivalent of five 30-minute walks. The guidelines added that 75 minutes of vigorous exercise a week, like jogging, could be substituted.[...]

This approach to exercise started to take off in 2006, when Martin Gibala, a physiologist at McMaster University in Ontario, and his colleagues published a study showing that a three-minute sequence on an electronic stationary bicycle — 30 seconds of punishing, all-out pedaling followed by a brief rest, repeated five or six times — led to the same muscle-cell adaptations as 90 to 120 minutes of prolonged bike riding. [...]

Researchers haven’t established a definitive period of time for an interval to provide maximum health benefits, Dr. Gibala said — although in his research and experience, a minute of hard effort followed by a minute of gentle recovery is effective.

Complete 10 such intervals three times a week for a total of 30 minutes of strenuous effort, he said, and “our data would indicate you’ll be in pretty good shape.”