Athletes rely on interval training to improve their speed and power, but generally as part of a broader, weekly training program that also includes extended, less-intense workouts, such as long runs or bicycling.

However in the past couple of years, scientists and many sportspeople have become interested in the idea of exercising exclusively with intervals, ditching long workouts altogether.

The attraction of this approach is obvious to all. Interval exercise duration can be short, making this form of exercise a positive gift for anyone who feels that they never have enough time to exercise.
Prior to this study most studies of interval training have had limitations, such as not including a control group, being of short duration or studying only health or fitness results, not a combination of both.

For this reason fundamental and important questions have remained unanswered about just how well these short, very intense workouts really compare to traditional, endurance type training.
This led scientists at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, (who had themselves conducted many of those earlier studies of interval training), to conduct what has been recognized as the most scientifically rigorous comparison to date of super short and standard exercise programs.

They recruited 25 out-of-shape men and measuring their aerobic fitness levels and as a marker of their general health their body’s ability to use insulin properly to keep blood sugar levels regular. The scientists also biopsied the men’s muscles to examine functioning at a cellular level.
The researchers then randomly divided the men into 3 groups. One group was asked to change nothing about their current, low levels of exercise – these would then be the controls.

A second group began a typical endurance workout exercise regime, consisting of riding at a moderate pace on a stationary bike in the lab for forty five minutes, with a 2-minute warm-up and 3-minute cool down time.

The last group was tasked with interval training, using the most abbreviated workout proven to have verifiable benefits. The volunteers warmed up for 2 minutes on stationary bikes, then pedalled as hard as possible for twenty seconds; rode at a very slow pace for 2 minutes, sprinted all-out again for twenty seconds; then recovered with slow riding for another 2 minutes; pedalled all out for a last twenty seconds; then cooled down for 3 minutes. The entire workout lasted ten minutes, with only 1 minute of that time being strenuous.

Both groups completed three sessions each week for twelve weeks, a period of time that is about 2x as long as in most past studies of interval training.

By the end of the study which was published in PLOS One, the endurance group had ridden for 27 hours, while the interval group had ridden for six hours, with only 36 minutes of that time being high energy exercise.

However, when the scientists retested aerobic fitness, muscles and blood sugar control, they found that the exercisers showed almost identical gains, whether they had completed the long endurance workouts or the short, more stressful interval routine. In both groups of subjects, endurance had increased by nearly twenty percent, insulin resistance had likewise improved significantly. There were also significant increases in the number and function of certain microscopic structures in the men’s muscles which were related to energy production and oxygen use.

The control group showed no changes in health or fitness.

The result indicates that three months of concerted endurance or interval exercise can almost identically improve someone’s fitness and health.
Is that enough reason for folk who currently exercise moderately or not at all to begin interval training as their only workout choice?

Martin Gibala, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University says:

it depends on who you are and why you exercise

If you are an elite athlete, then obviously incorporating both endurance and interval training into an overall program maximizes performance. But if you are someone, like me, who just wants to boost health and fitness and you don’t have 45 minutes or an hour to work out, our data show that you can get big benefits from even a single minute of intense exercise.

The post Can you get Away with Just One Minute of Exercise? first appeared on Healthy Gab.

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As sufferers know, depression is characterised in part by continuous negative thoughts and reminiscing about unhappy memories from the past. Researchers suspect that this thought pattern, known as ‘rumination’, may take place in two specific areas of the brain: the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain that helps to regulate attention and focus, and the hippocampus, which is essential for learning and memory. Some research indicates that people with severe depression have a smaller hippocampus than people who are not suffering from depression.

Meditation and exercise have been found to affect those same portions of the brain, although in different ways. In brain scan studies, people who meditate regularly generally display different patterns of brain-cell communication in their prefrontal cortex during cognitive tests than people who don’t. Those differences are believed to indicate that those practicing meditation possess a more refined ability to focus and concentrate.

The effect of exercise is also apparent in animal studies where aerobic exercise has been shown to substantially increase the production of new brain cells in the hippocampus.

Both meditation and exercise also have proven to contribute favourably in the treatment of anxiety, depression and other mood disorders.

These findings about exercise and meditation interested researchers at Rutgers University in New

Brunswick, N.J., who theorised that since meditation and exercise on their own improve moods, combining the two might intensify the impacts of each.

So a new study, which was published last month in Translational Psychiatry was conducted. In this study the scientists enlisted 52 men and women, 22 of whom had been given diagnoses of depression. The researchers confirmed that diagnosis with a battery of their own tests and then asked all of the volunteers to complete a computerised evaluation of their ability to focus while sensors were used to gauge electrical signals in their brains.

The results showed that the depressed volunteers showed brainwave patterns in their prefrontal cortex that are often associated with poor concentration and focus issues.

Then the scientists had all the volunteers begin a closely supervised program of inactivity, followed by sweating.

In the first part of the study volunteers were instructed in a form of meditation known as ‘focused attention’. This is an entry level mindfulness meditation. It required that the volunteers sit quietly and control their breathing by counting their breaths up to 10 and then backward. This practice can be challenging at first.

If people found their thoughts wandering during the meditation, and especially if they began to dwell on unpleasant memories, they were instructed not to worry or become self-judgemental, but just to start counting again from one

said Brandon Alderman, a professor of exercise science at Rutgers who led the study.

The volunteers meditated in this way for 20 minutes, then stood and undertook 10 minutes of walking meditation, in which they focused on each footfall.

Then they used treadmills or stationary bicycles at the lab and jogged or pedalled at a moderate pace for 30 minutes (with five minutes of warming up and five minutes of cooling down).

The volunteers completed these sessions 2x a week for two months. Then the researchers retested their moods and their ability to focus and concentrate.

All volunteers demonstrated significant changes. The 22 volunteers with depression now had a 40 percent reduction in symptoms of the condition. They reported, in particular, much less inclination to revisit bad memories.

The members of the healthy control group also reported feeling happier than they had at the start of the study.

The volunteers’ results on the computerised tests (of their ability to focus and their brain activity) were also different. The group with depression now demonstrated brain activity in their prefrontal cortex that was almost the same as people not suffering from depression. They could focus much better and refine their methods of paying attention, both attributes that are believed to help reduce stubborn rumination.

Dr. Alderman and his colleagues theorise that the meditation and exercise may have produced synergistic effects on the brains of their volunteers.

Dr. Alderman believes that the exercise most likely increased the number of new brain cells in each volunteer’s hippocampus, while the meditation may have assisted in keeping more of those neurons alive and fully functional.

Meditation also may have made the exercise more pleasant, he said, since some studies indicate that being mindful of your breathing and your body during workouts increases people’s enjoyment of exercise.

While was a small study and the scientists did not continue to monitor their volunteers in the long term, it is not known if the mood improvements continue. The researchers also have no idea whether similar or even greater benefits might occur if someone were to run and then meditate or to practice both activities but on alternating days. Further studies are planned to add essential knowledge that will allow the approach to be refined.

The post Natural Way to Treat Depression first appeared on Healthy Gab.

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In a new first, scientists compared the neurological impacts of different types of exercise, including running, weight training and high-intensity interval training. The results suggest that high impact training may not be the best choice to maintain long-term brain health.

Exercise has been shown to change the structure and functioning of the brain. Studies in animals and people have shown that physical activity usually increases brain volume and can reduce the frequency and size of age-related holes in various parts of the brain.

Exercise also augments adult neurogenesis, (the creation of new brain cells in an already mature brain). In studies of animals, exercise involving running wheels or treadmills can double or even triple the number of new neurons that appear in the animals’ hippocampus, which is a key area of the brain associated with learning and memory. This result was apparent when comparing the brains of animals that remain sedentary with those that underwent exercise. Although not proven many scientists believe that the human hippocampus would be similarly affected.

These studies of exercise and neurogenesis have focused on distance running. Lab rodents of course know how to run. But the question still remains whether other forms of exercise would also prompt increases in neurogenesis.

The current study, which was published this month in the Journal of Physiology, involved researchers at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland (and other institutions) injecting rats with a substance that marks new brain cells. These researchers then set groups of rats a variety of different workouts, with one group remaining sedentary to serve as a control group.

Some groups of rats were given running wheels in their cages, allowing them to run at will. Most jogged moderately every day for several miles.

Other groups began resistance training, which involved climbing a wall with weights attached to their tails.

There was also the rodent equivalent of high-intensity interval training. For this the animals were placed on small treadmills and required to sprint at a very rapid and strenuous pace for three minutes, followed by two minutes of slow activity, with the entire sequence repeated twice more, for a total of 15 minutes.

The study continued for seven weeks. At the end of the time period the researchers examined brain tissue from the hippocampus of each animal.

There were differing levels of neurogenesis, dependant on how each animal had exercised.
Those rats that had jogged on wheels showed robust levels of neurogenesis, far more than in the brains of the sedentary animals. The greater the distance that the animal had covered during the experiment, the more new cells its brain grew.

There were far fewer new neurons in the brains of rats that had completed high-intensity interval training. They showed somewhat higher amounts than in the sedentary animals but less than in the distance runners.

And the weight-training rats showed no discernible augmentation of neurogenesis, although their strength levels had increased. Their hippocampal tissue looked just like that of the animals that had not exercised at all.

According to Miriam Nokia, a research fellow at the University of Jyvaskyla “sustained aerobic exercise might be most beneficial for brain health also in humans.”

Dr. Nokia and her colleagues theorise that distance running stimulates the release of brain-derived neurotrophic factor which is known to regulate neurogenesis. The more miles an animal runs, the more B.D.N.F. it produces.

Weight training, on the other hand, while beneficial for muscular health, has previously been shown to have little effect on the body’s levels of B.D.N.F.

According to Dr. Nokia high-intensity interval training, is much more physiologically draining and stressful than moderate running, and “stress tends to decrease adult hippocampal neurogenesis,” she said.

These results do not mean, however, that only running and similar moderate endurance workouts strengthen the brain, Dr. Nokia said. Those activities do seem to prompt the most neurogenesis in the hippocampus. But the other types of exercise may lead to different types of changes in the brain. They could encourage the creation of additional blood vessels or new connections between brain cells or between different parts of the brain.

So if you’re at the gym doing weight training perhaps you should also think about mixing it up a bit more. Get on your bike or hit the cardio circuit a bit more often.

 

The post The Fast Track To Brain Health first appeared on Healthy Gab.

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