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3 Minutes exercise per week?

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  1. #1

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    3 Minutes exercise per week?

    Great BBC documentary about the impact of exercise on health

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FZ_BGhA7SK8

    It appears on 3 minutes of HIIT per week has a major impact on health.

    Should you fit a gym bike in your office?

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  2. #2

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    That's great news. The small gym in my building often has overweight people cycling, or walking, very slowly on the equipment for long periods while talking on their phone or watching some video, depriving higher intensity users and deriving little or no benefit themselves. This revelation means they can relocate to their apartment after their 3 minutes and leave the gym to people who actually enjoy using it. A win-win.


  3. #3

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    I've seen a lot of similar stuff .. but I think the 3 mins is good for beginners to shock the system, but after a while the body tends to adapt to the 3 mins and you need more. Right?

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  4. #4

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    Regular sessions of the HIIT would result in increased capability over time and, as you say, the improvement would be greatest at the beginning. But rather than doing more (longer session), I would say you should focus on maintaining the relative intensity level (eg. 90% max HR) by slightly modifying the interval speed. This doesn't imply an ever increasing speed over time since your body is subject to many factors that will impact relative effort on a given day.
    Definitely worth a try but challenging for people unused to pushing their body to the extreme - very probably the people who would benefit most.

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  5. #5

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    Original Post Deleted
    Yes, it can't get easier since you are maintaining the effort and therefore need to keep pushing. I think the key with HIIT is to focus on the intensity and do a full recovery between reps. I wouldn't decrease the recovery time unless I was using the method to train for a race longer than the rep time. But the HIIT isn't for running training, its for other health benefits.
    Using your HR as a guide (hopefully you have a good Heart Monitor) I would suggest that you wait until your HR has gone back down to your recovery level before starting the next rep up to your target HR.
    Full recovery is necessary to maintain the intensity and hopefully leave you less wrecked.
    Last edited by alanjg; 15-02-2016 at 02:14 PM.
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  6. #6

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    Original Post Deleted
    What you describe is what I would expect, that you need longer to recover as the session goes on and that the last ones are toughest. As you say, graduated recovery time may be worth trying, start with 30 secs and keep adding 10 secs. Regarding the last part, I think it can be wiser - depending on how you feel on the day - to cut the session at 10 rather than persisting to 12. I suspect the health benefit is almost fully gained by the 10 reps and on some days the last 2 reps may strain you to much.
    Remembering that "you are an experiment of one" (Dr..George Sheehan)

  7. #7

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    Quote Originally Posted by shri:
    I've seen a lot of similar stuff .. but I think the 3 mins is good for beginners to shock the system, but after a while the body tends to adapt to the 3 mins and you need more. Right?
    No

    The science suggests that significant ongoing improvements can be achieved with just a few high intensity minutes per week.

    Just trying to rationalise this. I guess if you treat the heart as a muscle much like any other and applied the same logic to say the bicep. If you did 3 minutes of the very highest strength training each week your bicep muscle would be much stronger.

  8. #8

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    Original Post Deleted
    That's the point, you're meant to be tired when starting the sets and you feel knackered. That's when you get more benefit, when you're pushing your body to it's limits.

    You get what you train for, so if your body is used to taking longer rests, then your body will always require longer rest between intervals, if you take shorter rests and feel knackered, your body will eventually adapt.