The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That's Smarter, Faster, Shorter

by Martin Gibala

reducing subjects’ blood sugar,

the bigger the disturbance from homeostasis, the greater the adaptation. So going from homeostasis at rest to a light jog is good. But going from rest to a full run is better. And best of all is going from rest to an all-out sprint. And even better than all that, if you’re really looking to cram the biggest performance benefits into the smallest amount of time? Repeat the number of disturbances in a single workout by doing intervals—whether they’re light-jogging intervals or as-hard-as-you-can Wingate tests.

in Finland by the Olympic champion runner Hannes Kolehmainen. He won three gold medals at the 1912 Summer Games in Stockholm, in the 5,000-meter, the 10,000-meter, and the cross-country events.

Another Finnish runner, Paavo Nurmi, used interval-training techniques to win nine Olympic gold medals, including five at the 1924 Paris Games, where he won gold in the 1,500-meter and 5,000-meter events despite their being held just fifty-five minutes apart.

And the greatest innovator of the next generation of legendary runners, Emil Zátopek, based his training on Nurmi’s techniques, to the extent that intervals were virtually all that Záto...

While training for the 1952 Olympics, Zátopek conducted a daily workout that involved twenty repeats of a 200-meter sprint, forty repeats of a 400-meter sprint, and then...

The solution begins with something physiologists call rating of perceived exertion, or RPE. The psychologist Gunnar A.V. Borg of the University of Stockholm introduced the concept in 1970.

That study showed that three months of interval walking repeated four times a week increased cardiorespiratory fitness by more than 25 percent and spurred a 6 percent reduction in systolic blood pressure—the important first, higher number of any blood pressure reading. The Mayo Clinic–Shinshu University study subjects averaged 34-minute-long bouts of interval walking.

a guy named Andy Magness, an adventure racer who once was based in North Dakota and now lives on New Zealand’s South Island. Early in his ultra-running career, Andy became accustomed to placing well in ultramarathons of fifty miles and adventure races that saw him spending anywhere from two to ten days traversing some of Earth’s most forbidding territories. Then in 2007, he became a father and faced increasing work commitments—a situation very similar to the one I described at the beginning of this book. Andy was unable to afford the ten to fifteen hours a week he’d previously devoted to his training. The thing was, he still wanted to challenge himself with adventure races. The answer turned out to be high-intensity interval training. Today Andy still runs a half-dozen big races a year, from Wisconsin’s 64-mile Frozen Otter Ultra Trek to the team-based, 6-day, 250-mile Abu Dhabi Adventure Challenge. And yet Magness trains only thirty minutes a week.

How low can you go? People ask me that question all the time. I’ll be up at the lectern for a speaking engagement at a conference. I’ll finish my talk and open the floor for questions, and often the first person to raise a hand will ask, “How little can you get away with?” Or some variation. What they mean is, what’s the minimum amount of exercise possible to do while still ensuring that you live a long and healthy life? For ultramarathoners, Andy Magness likely is brushing up against the minimum possible. Google him—he’s all over the web, and he has an e-book about his interval-based training methods. For the rest of us—the people who just want to get in shape and stay there—the answer, based on current science, is a minute. A minute of hard exercise. You sprint as hard as you can, for twenty seconds, and then repeat that twice more for a total of three sprints? Congratulations. You’ve just done the most potent workout available.

why: Intensity is more important than duration. Relative to all sorts of health benefits, it is more time-efficient to exercise hard for a short amount of time than it is to exercise easy for a long amount of time.

The progressive decrease in energy stores triggers all sorts of adaptations. The longer you exercise in this manner, the better the effect. We know by now though that there’s another, faster way to activate this switch. This way flips the switch by depleting the energy stores quickly. It’s the rate at which you deplete your energy, rather than the energy store’s absolute level. And the faster you deplete the energy stores, the better. You make the energy stores go down really fast? Then you get a lot of exercise effects. The most time-effective way to get exercise effects using this method is to exercise as hard as you’re able. And it’s best to repeat your burst a few times in a row—to do at least a couple of intervals. To flip the switch this way, it matter less how long you exercise. What’s more important is that when you do exercise, you go hard.

The faster you walked, the longer you lived. The distance you walked didn’t have much effect.

Men who cycled fast tended to live 5.3 years longer than those who cycled slowly; fast-cycling women tended to live 3.9 years longer than their slower-cycling counterparts. There was absolutely no relationship for the duration of cycling.

Other studies indicate a similar phenomenon. A 2011 Taiwanese study that appeared in the Lancet tracked more than four hundred thousand people, and it turned out that sixty minutes of moderate physical activity a day cut their overall risk of dying by about 25 percent—a remarkable figure. But those who did only fifteen minutes of physical activity a day also saw the same reduction—so long as they were exercising vigorously.

They thought about the way that the benefits of intense exercise happen because hard physical activity recruits all the muscle’s fibers, causing the fuel stores in the muscle cells to decrease quickly. Metcalfe and his colleagues realized that most of that decrease in fuel levels happens during the first fifteen seconds of the sprint. In fact, after this time, metabolic by-products start to accumulate that actually inhibit energy provision—that’s

Metcalfe established a protocol that places only two sprints of twenty seconds in a workout that, including warm-up, recovery, and cool-down, lasts just ten minutes long. He called it reduced-exertion high-intensity training, or REHIT.

Another big influence was Tabata’s 1996 protocol, which involves eight bursts for twenty seconds, except the rest period in Tabata is just ten seconds, for a total time of four minutes.

We decided the answer was three repeats. We set our three repeats into a workout that lasted ten minutes, from start to finish. So a two-minute warm-up followed by a twenty-second sprint, repeated three times and followed by a three-minute cool-down. We had a group of subjects repeat the One-Minute Workout three times a week for six weeks. Our study also was more involved than Metcalfe’s previous twenty-second studies, as we included additional measurements like muscle biopsies to examine changes in the subjects’s muscles. The key findings were a 12 percent increase in cardiorespiratory fitness and a 7 percent decrease in resting arterial blood pressure. The study generated a flurry of media attention and was accessed more than fifty thousand times in the first year that it was published in the journal PLoS ONE.

That’s right. It was possible for everyday, nonathletic sedentary individuals to derive the cardiorespiratory benefits of 150 minutes a week of traditional endurance training—three 50-minute sessions per week—with just a single minute’s worth of hard exercise repeated three times per week. I’ve described the One-Minute Workout at the end of this chapter in more detail, in case you’re ready to try it yourself.

is, more frequently than once per week. To get the maximum effect of cardiovascular disease risk reduction, Wisløff’s study found that all you have to do is exercise hard once per week.

Rather, academic studies have shown the muscles like it best when they get the optimum dose of protein every four hours.

Consequently, Phillips suggests that interval trainers looking to maximize fat loss while also minimally losing muscle mass eat their optimal 0.11 gram per pound of bodyweight every four hours throughout the day with a double dose taken immediately before bed. That amounts to one dose of protein at 6 a.m., more at 10 a.m., 2 p.m., and 6 p.m., and a double dose at 10 p.m. Here’s hoping that the vegetarians among us like eating tofu, nuts, and whey protein powder. For all the rest of us—enjoy the chicken!

So what’s more important—diet or exercise? It’s a question physiologists get asked all the time. Phillips likes to say that muscles are made in the gym and fat is lost in the kitchen. But the fact is, if you’re intent on looking and feeling good, then exercise and a healthy diet together are better than either in isolation. Both Phillips and I agree: Do both. “The two together are not just additive, in terms of overall effect,” he says. “They’re synergistic.”

A company in Britain is trying to make that future a reality with a product called the High-Octane Ride, which amounts to a software-equipped exercise bike and a privacy screen shaped like a giant lampshade. The whole thing occupies about the same footprint as a work desk, and it’s designed to provide the British public with a sprint workout virtually anywhere—whether the office, the department store, or the park.

The workout, the company says, is intense, but over so quickly that its practitioners don’t sweat much—so it’s possible, and indeed practical, to conduct the workout in work clothes, at the office, between meetings and conference calls. “Because there’s no need to change or take a shower afterwards, [High-Octane Ride] is ideal in the office,” says the company’s marketing literature. “Morning sessions can accelerate fat burning, . . . a session at the end of the working day is a great mood booster.” And then there’s the line that I love: “A 45-minute jog is so 2014.”

Now, our conception of both muscle and fat cells has transformed. Rather than being mute, we understand that both muscle and fat cells communicate in a veritable symphony’s worth of different notes.

substances released by muscle tissue in response to exercise be known as myokines. Since IL-6, many other myokines have been identified. They have abbreviations like LIF, IL-4, and BDNF, and each one is thought to summon a different exercise response in the body. Muscle cells now are thought to have the capacity to secrete hundreds of different compounds, each of which has its own peculiar communication function. A similar range of complexity exists for the substances secreted by fat cells.

Researchers Bente Pedersen and Mark Febbraio refer to a “yin-yang balance” that exists between myokines and the signals sent out by fat cells, which are called adipokines.

IL-6, for example, is thought to be released when the muscle’s stores of glycogen are low. It speeds up the body’s ability to burn fat cells and helps the body control its blood sugar levels.

IL-15 may help to regulate belly fat. Insulin growth factor 1 and fibroblast growth factor 2 may help build strong bones. Follistatin-related protein 1 promotes the health of blood vessel walls. Still other myokines defend against the development of cancerous tumors. And many of these myokines promote strong muscles from within.

My longtime colleague at McMaster, Mark Tarnopolsky, has conducted some fascinating research on the dramatic effect that exercise can have on all tissues of the body. One of his remarkable studies, published in 2011, illustrates the way exercise could reverse the normal effects of aging.

One group of the genetically modified mice didn’t age prematurely, however, despite the fact that they were bred to have faulty mitochondrial-repair capacities—and that was the mice that exercised.

“The concept of taking a pill to obtain the benefits of exercise without actually expending any energy has mass appeal for a large majority of sedentary individuals,” wrote the scientists John Hawley and John Holloszy in a 2009 review on the state of exercise pill research. “It is equally attractive for big pharmaceutical companies that view a potentially huge market and profit numbers.”