Take Control of Your Diabetes Risk by John Whyte Md Mph

Author:John Whyte, Md, Mph
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harper Horizon
Published: 2021-12-29T00:00:00+00:00

Think You Have No Time to Exercise? What About a Few Minutes?

For some people, 150 minutes a week is going to be a real challenge sometimes. I get it—there are only so many hours in a day. Lack of time is, after all, the number one reason people cite for not exercising. There are some exceptions to the suggestion of 150 minutes weekly, but it requires different types and styles of exercise. If you’re pressed for time but don’t want to miss out on the benefits of exercise, you may want to consider high-intensity interval training. Often referred to as HIIT and long used by elite athletes, this type of workout involves doing extremely short bursts of vigorous exercise followed by very brief periods of rest. In recent years, an explosion of research has shown that high-intensity interval training might provide greater metabolic benefits than other forms of exercise. And best of all, it’s quick and efficient. Thanks to HIIT, some people can get all the benefits of regular exercise in a fraction of the time—minutes, in some cases—along with even sharper reductions in body fat, inflammation, and blood sugar levels.

One of the best things about HIIT is that you can apply it to just about any form of exercise, including the simplest: walking. Several studies have looked at the impact of applying a HIIT protocol to walking—going at a vigorous pace for four minutes, then slowing to a low-intensity pace for three minutes and repeating this cycle four times. Researchers found that this strategy led to significantly greater improvements in cardiovascular health than the same amount of exercise performed at moderate intensity—and it only takes thirty minutes!

Want to make it even simpler? Consider this: some recent data showed that older adults with type 2 diabetes who did a “3 × 3” HIIT protocol for sixteen weeks—three minutes of fast walking followed by three minutes of slow walking and then repeated—had greater improvements in their body composition, aerobic fitness, and blood sugar control than a group that did the same amount of exercise at a moderate intensity. A comprehensive analysis found that in people with prediabetes, high-intensity interval training produced double the improvement in cardiorespiratory fitness compared to moderate-intensity exercise. Remember that poor cardiorespiratory fitness is a strong predictor of early death in people with diabetes.

The remarkable thing about high-intensity interval training is that more and more research shows that there are benefits seemingly no matter how low you go. One of my favorite forms of interval training is what’s called “low-volume HIIT.” This involves exercising at a hard intensity for one minute or less, resting for the same amount of time, and then repeating. If time is an issue for you, this approach might work for you because you can do this type of workout in less than twenty minutes and still see benefits. In a recent study, scientists recruited people with type 2 diabetes and instructed them do a short but intense “10-1” interval workout on a stationary

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