Researchers keep moving the goal posts on exercise. For a while, the trend was to show benefits of minimal exercise, perhaps as an olive branch to people too busy for a full workout. Lately, the trend is essentially to say effort matters; more exercise means better health. So which is right? Both are. But one overrides standard health guidelines.
Health institutions say people need about 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of intense aerobic exercise each week. Moderate exercise might be brisk walking or active gardening, while intense exercise would include uphill cycling, sprints, tennis or squash.
In 2013, the peer-reviewed science journal PLOS ONE published a paper on a high-intensity workout that lasts four minutes. Twenty-six inactive, overweight, but otherwise healthy, middle-aged men were placed in two exercise programs. For 10 weeks three times a week, one group did four four-minute intense sessions (running on a treadmill as fast as they can) with rest intervals, while the other group did one four-minute intense session.
