A few weeks back, the NYT ran a story surveying various studies and literature to figure out what was the best form of excercise. Of course, I was rooting for running to come out on top, but really didn’t expect that to happen. But I also didn’t expect some of the results. First, the setup:
Ask a dozen physiologists which exercise is best, and you’ll get a dozen wildly divergent replies. “Trying to choose” a single best exercise is “like trying to condense the entire field” of exercise science, said Martin Gibala, the chairman of the department of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario.
But when pressed, he suggested one of the foundations of old-fashioned calisthenics: the burpee, in which you drop to the ground, kick your feet out behind you, pull your feet back in and leap up as high as you can. “It builds muscles. It builds endurance.” He paused. “But it’s hard to imagine most people enjoying” an all-burpees program, “or sticking with it for long.”
Exactly. What good is an exercise option if it can’t become part of a life-long program. Because that’s the thing you figure out pretty soon after committing to being in shape: you’re done when you die…
One of the interesting things mentioned is that
“The majority of the mortality-related benefits” from exercising are due to the first 30 minutes of exercise, said Timothy Church, M.D… A recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality showed that, in general, a sedentary person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began brisk walking (or the equivalent) for 30 minutes five times a week. If he or she tripled that amount, for instance, to 90 minutes of exercise four or five times a week, his or her risk of premature death dropped by only another 4 percent.
That drop-off of effect is astonishing. Less may not be more, but it can be enough. It’s a principle I’m reading about in Tim Ferriss’s new book, The Four-Hour Body
So, back to the NYT article. What did it come up with, in the end? Contestant #1:
“I personally think that brisk walking is far and away the single best exercise,” said Michael Joyner, M.D.
Contestant #2:
“I nominate the squat,” said Stuart Phillips, Ph.D… The squat “activates the body’s biggest muscles, those in the buttocks, back and legs.” It’s simple. “Just fold your arms across your chest,” he said, “bend your knees and lower your trunk until your thighs are about parallel with the floor. Do that 25 times. It’s a very potent exercise.” Use a barbell once the body-weight squats grow easy.
The best thing about the squat, Phillips said, is that it, unlike walking (or running), also combats the dreaded sarcopenia (loss of muscle mass).
Contestant #3:
“I think, actually, that you can make a strong case for H.I.T.,” [Martin] Gibala said. High-intensity interval training, or H.I.T. as it’s familiarly known among physiologists, is essentially all-interval exercise. As studied in Gibala’s lab, it involves grunting through a series of short, strenuous intervals on specialized stationary bicycles, known as Wingate ergometers. In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise. After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours. [Emphasis added]
Ok, so clearly spinning is not a candidate in this beauty contest. The astonishing effects of H.I.T. is also explored by Ferriss in his book. He prepares for an ultra-marathon by doing only sprints and intense weight lifting activity. Gibalas also tried his H.I.T. methods with runners:
a group of recreational runners practiced H.I.T. on the track, they enjoyed the workout more than a second group of runners who jogged continuously for 50 minutes. The H.I.T. runners, the study’s authors suspect, were less bored.
Running, boring? C’mon.
The only glaring inadequacy of H.I.T. is that it builds muscular strength less effectively than, say, the squat. But even that can be partially remedied, Gibala said: “Sprinting up stairs is a power workout and interval session simultaneously.”
Yes, well, call me biased, but I don’t see people lining up to take part in a “stair-a-thon,” well, unless you offer them a shirt for their pain.
Main thing I get from this article? There is no one solution. Mix it up. Keep it interesting, keep it fun. Why not just stop mid-run, do a few squats, or run up some stairs or drop for some pushups, then carry on?
