Short on time? Quick, intense workouts just as good

The only way to get in shape, the long-held thinking goes, is to exercise for 30 to 60 minutes most days of the week. With that kind of time commitment, it's no wonder so few of us bother.

But there's a quicker solution, one that athletes have known for years and one that could be a practical solution for time-crunched regular folk, according to fitness reporter Alex Hutchinson.

It's called high intensity training, or HIT, and it's one of many areas of research Hutchinson describes in his new book, "Which Comes First, Cardio or Weights."

"This is one of the most interesting and practical areas of research that's come along in years," said Hutchinson, who has written about the science of fitness for years for his Globe and Mail column Jockology, and his blog Sweat Science.

HIT is the concept of doing short bursts of intense exercise with recovery breaks in between. Compressing a workout into less time is not new. It's how Roger Bannister "broke" the four-minute mile in the 1950s, for example, Hutchinson points out.

"But in the last few years, there have been a whole bunch of studies that have shown that… short intense, workouts are as good as -- and sometimes even better -- than longer (workouts)," he tells CTV.ca.

In fact, one study found that a 20-minute high-intensity workout performed three times a week can offer the same cardiovascular benefits as running or jogging for an hour at a time, five times week," Hutchinson's book points out.

"The researchers aren't saying that 'magic' interval training is better than regular cardio. They're just saying if time is an issue, here's how you can get the same benefits," he says.

Hutchinson has summarized this research along with many of the other studies he's analyzed over the last three years. The result is a book that provides the latest and best science on 150 questions about fitness and exercise.

Hutchinson wrote the book, he says, because fitness research often doesn't trickle down to most of us. Elite athletes might keep on top of it, but regular folk still hold on to the fitness lessons they were taught in gym class.

That might explain why you'll still see amateur runners stretching and lunging before a race, even when the recent science has shown that pre-workout, static stretching isn't helpful and actually risks injury.

Another myth Hutchinson addresses is that skinny people are healthier than overweight people. In fact, studies show that those who exercise regularly -- even if they carry around extra weight -- tend to have healthier hearts than sedentary folk.

"This area of research has been going on for about 20 years with a small subset of researchers saying, ‘Hang on, maybe we've been too obsessed with fat and body weight,'" says Hutchinson.

What researchers are finding is that poor aerobic fitness is the best predictor of heart disease and early death.

"So while being overweight is not the optimal scenario, if you had to choose, it's better to be fit enough to go for long walks or jogs, than to be totally sedentary," the author says.

Another myth is that getting in shape takes ages. In fact, the benefits of exercise begin from the first workout; the problem is that most of those changes aren't visible at first.

Hutchinson's book cites a study that had a group of exercisers do intensive, full-body weight workouts four times a week for nine weeks. They then asked outsiders to describe the physical changes in the exercises. The bad news: the observers couldn't see any changes.

"That's the downer," says Hutchinson. "But the important message comes from the studies that show that the changes in your body start within literally a few hours of your first workout. Your insulin sensitivity changes right away, and if you stick with it for a couple of weeks, you can make long-lasting changes."

"The same thing goes with weight training: you start getting stronger within a week or two," he says. "The health benefits of exercise are starting literally today. You do a workout and you're already getting healthier."

Of course, all of these "latest findings" are just that: only the latest word from the fitness research community. It's always possible that researchers will conduct more studies in the future and decide that no, in fact, HIT training is not as good as regular training, or no, overweight and fit is not better than skinny and sedentary.

But Hutchinson says his goal with his book was to provide the best available evidence he could, in ways that readers could understand.

"My hope is to bring together what we know about how the body responds to exercise, answer the questions we know how to answer, give the evidence we do know, and not try to answer the questions on what we don't know."