This is a 4-second exercise for those who sit a lot but are sedentary

If anyone doubts the benefits of 5 minutes of exercise during breaks, a new study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exrcise will surprise them. Scientists say even 4-second-long exercises work to improve people's health.

Although these exercises are performed on a specialized bicycle gear, it is still a testament to the HIIT exercises, high intensity exercise in minutes or even seconds, already Giving us significant health benefits.

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Humans have never been as lazy as they are now

There is a truth, people are increasingly lazy to exercise. God did not want us to sit very much at first. In the entire 1,400 pages of the Bible, you could not find a chair mentioned.

But in the second half of the 19th century, the Second Industrial Revolution invented all kinds of tools like typewriter, telegraph, cinema to make people know that we can sit and work and play. .

The labor market began to change rapidly. Office industries began to develop and thrive. Today, these are the majority jobs. The more new careers, the more they require us to sit more, imagine the office of a streamer now, the chair is almost a colleague of them.

Epidemiological studies show that most US adults now sit up to 10 hours a day. The total number of hours is likely to increase when they stay home all day during the COVID-19 pandemic. Plus 8 hours of sleep a day, that means people are inactive in 75% of their lives.

Numerous studies have pointed out the harmful effects of excessive sitting. It increases the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and other metabolic disorders. 

In particular, spending long hours sitting in a chair can make your muscles less sphincter to release triglycerides. It causes this fatty acid to build up in the blood, and as you know, triglycerides cause an increased risk of cardiovascular disease.

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In theory, exercise will help solve this problem, as it causes muscles to contract and resolve fatty acids. But some past experiments suggest that just exercising for a short time is not enough.

Among them are several studies done at the University of Texas, USA several years ago. Scientists recruit young and healthy volunteers to sit around all day for science. 

These volunteers then had higher blood triglyceride levels, when they ate a high-fat meal the next day. Too much sitting makes metabolism, break down and remove fatty acids from their blood inefficient.

The scientists found that not even an hour of running a day could help these young volunteers to bring their fat metabolism to normal the next day. 

That is the basis for them to speculate that the adverse metabolic reactions still occur regardless of the physical activity of people sitting much can not compensate for the harmful effects of physical inactivity.

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4-second exercise, why not?

The above studies once again reinforce the classic view of exercise, saying that we need to accumulate enough exercise time to reverse health problems.

However, the limitation of experiments in this study is that scientists only use exercises of moderate intensity at a fixed time of day. So some other researchers recently started wondering: 

Will short, more regular exercise throughout the day, especially if they are high-intensity, better prevent the unwanted effects of sitting too much?

To test that, a new study in the journal Medicine & Science in Sports & Exrcise recruited eight healthy young men and women to perform a new experiment. The experiment was strictly controlled, and volunteers were paid to stay in the lab at the University of Texas all day. They were asked to sit and stand up only when they went to the bathroom.

In the morning, these volunteers were fed a high-fat breakfast. Scientists will then monitor their body's metabolic reactions for 6 hours after a meal.

On a separate day, volunteers were asked to integrate short exercise sessions after each hour of their sitting. Scientists continue to monitor the metabolic reaction to see if the volunteers' blood triglyceride levels have changed.

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This exercise is extremely short. Volunteers will ride a bicycle on site with heavy flywheels. It is often used to test the leg strength and lung performance of professional athletes.

In those tests, a professional athlete would take 2 seconds to accelerate the flywheel to full speed, using up their full power. But for normal volunteers, the scientists will give them double the time, up to 4 seconds.

They were asked to pedal the flywheel 5 times, 4 seconds each time, take a 45 second break and then step another 4 seconds. A total of 200 seconds. Every hour of continuous sitting, volunteers are asked to do 5 sessions of 4 seconds. A total of 8 hours a day is 8 episodes.

After the exercise day, the scientists fed volunteers a high-fat breakfast to monitor their metabolism. And as expected, a day with just 160 seconds of exercise all, excluding the time off, reduced blood triglyceride levels by 30% during 6 hours after a meal.

Volunteers obviously burned more blood fat while they sat down. The benefits of a day of exercise have continued until the next day, helping to overcome the harmful effects of being sedentary, said Professor Ed Coyle from the University of Texas.

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However, it is undeniable that this is only a small, short-term experiment and its results cannot be used to extrapolate too much. But Professor Coyle said the basic theory of his research could still be applied to everyday life.

If you feel you've been sitting in one place for too long, you can get up for a while and do short, high-intensity exercises. In fact, 4 seconds of cycling with the flywheel in the study will need to be extended, if you use other normal exercises like sprinting or climbing stairs. 

But the principle is that in this one HIIT phase, you need to reach your maximum production level. After that, take a 45-second break and repeat the HIIT phase 5 times like that. And do not forget to regularly practice this exercise during the day is a prerequisite.

You need to get up from the chair and do these exercises once every hour, do not work until the end of the day one will not work.