Some Startling Revelations About Exercise, Fitness and Health

I watched a television program the other night about fitness: the program was actually about the latest research into health and fitness.

It centred mainly on research that was being done at the University of Nottingham in the UK.

It had come to some startling revelations about exercise.

The first was that if you don't exercise the fat levels and cholesterol builds up in your blood stream often to an alarming level. So a sedentary life style was not to be recommended. Any movement was highly beneficial: even standing was to be much preferred to sitting down and standing with a bit of movement had many benefits. The main benefit was that the fat levels and cholesterol levels in the blood dramatically decreased having major health benefits. So any kind of exercise was preferable to none.

So the next question was how much exercise do we really need?

It turns out we don't need that much: the body has a kind of switch that triggers with a relatively low level of exercise. This switch, once triggered, imparts many benefits to the body such as reducing fat levels and cholesterol and even influences aerobic fitness.

Now, it turns out that this low level of exercise is 20 seconds three times on an exercise day; and the exercise days are just three times in a week. So what you do is go as hard as you can on an exercise bike for twenty seconds: this flicks the switch in the body; then you rest for a minute or two and again go as hard as you can for twenty seconds. The rest would then be repeated followed by a third time of going as hard as you could on the exercise bike. In effect, all you are doing with the three energetic exercise bursts is ensuring you have really flicked the body's switch.

Now at the end of week one you would have done three exercise sessions with a total of 3 minutes actual exercise. So for the month, you would do 12 minutes of actual exercise.

I mentioned that this exercise program is apparently enough to influence the body's aerobic fitness: this apparently is dependent on your genes. The researchers at the University of Nottingham look for 11 tell tale genes and according to what they find, they can predict the amount of influence the exercises will have on aerobic fitness. They use a standard measure of VO2 max to measure aerobic fitness (VO2max is expressed either as an absolute rate in litres of oxygen per minute (l/min) or as a relative rate in millilitres of oxygen per kilogram of bodyweight per minute (ml/kg/min): the latter expression is often used to compare the performance of endurance sports athletes.

So there you have it: don't get a job sitting around all day; try and stand up at work; and if you can't get to the gym, do a twenty second burst of aerobic exercise.

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