Nearly all workouts will do your body good. One, though, may stand head and shoulders above them all. It’s not yoga. It’s not Pilates. And it’s definitely not running.
No: the king of workouts is actually the very much en vogue high-intensity interval training (HIIT), which has seen a huge amount of interest since its arrival on the workout scene. That interest will likely grow following the publication of a study in the medical journal Cell Metabolism. The study, conducted at the Mayo Clinic, tracked two groups of adult participants — one 30 and under, the other 65-80 — over 12 weeks performing three different workouts, including HIIT. At the end, the researchers found that the HIIT participants — defined as having partaken in “repeat[ed] short bouts of activity at near-maximal intensity,” specifically three days per week of cycling (“4 × 4 min at >90% of peak oxygen consumption with 3 min pedaling at no load”), plus two days a week of treadmill walking — had better results than participants who did either resistance training or a low-key, Goldilocks-style mix of the two. As CNN explains it: “[HIIT] encourages your cells to make more proteins to feed their energy-producing machinery — and this arrests the aging process.”
Notably, the benefits of the study might not be limited to exercisers: Dr. Sreekumaran Nair, senior author of the study, told CNN that the data collected might help researchers “develop targeted drugs to achieve some of the benefits that we derive from the exercise in people who cannot exercise.” Until then, it’s time to pull on those workout shoes.
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