Benefits Of Even Less Exercise: Now It’s 4 Minutes 3 Times A Week

It has to stop somewhere, but so far, the race to find benefits of increasingly brief bouts of exercise shows no signs of abating. Just two weeks after an article in the May-June issue of the American College of Sports Medicine’s Health & Fitness Journal extolled the benefits of seven minutes of exercise a day, PLOS One has published a Norwegian study touting the payoff of just four minutes of exercise done three times a week. A news release from the Norwegian University of Science and Technology reports that researchers measured changes in VO2max and traditional cardiovascular risk factors in 24 inactive but otherwise healthy overweight men after they completed a 10-week training session that involved three weekly high-intensity four-minute interval sessions. One group of 13 did intervals of 4 minutes of high intensity exercise at 90 percent of maximal heart rate interspersed with 3 minutes of active recovery at 70 maximal heart rate (knows as 4 x 4 training) while the other group followed a protocol that consisted of one 4-minute interval at 90 percent maximal heart rate. The researchers found that VO2max increased by 10 percent in the group that had just one high-intensity session three times a week, while the group that followed the 4×4 regime increased its VO2max by 13 percent. Both groups saw decreases in their blood pressure, but the 1-AIT the group’s blood pressures showed greater decreases than their 4-AIT counterparts for both systolic and diastolic readings.