Can you hack cardiorespiratory fitness?

1. Let's going to learn about the most time-efficient method to trigger the health boosting effects of physical activity. A way that you can get the benefits of a 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week in just a small fraction of the time. It's called, high-intensity interval training - HIIT. 
2. HIIT been in use by elite athletes for more than a 100 years. Employing intervals in their training regimes, was everyone from the record breaking four-minute mile Sir Roger Bannister, to the flying Fin Paavo Nurmi, to the American middle distance runner Steve Prefontaine. 
3. But very few mainstream amateurs ever used intervals, in part because very few scientists studied the aerobic benefits of interval training. 
4. One of the researchers who helped convince the world of the potency of interval training was the Japanese researcher Izumi Tabata. He showed in 1996 that training using brief intense intervals could substantially improve cardio-respiratory fitness.
5. In a study, a group of university students (athletic young men and women) were assessed their baseline fitness by testing how long the subjects could pedal a stationary bike against a tough resistance. 
6. Then the subjects underwent  training intervention consisting of six training sessions over two weeks. The sessions were difficult but short. Each one required the subjects to conduct a half dozen sprints. Each sprint required the subject to peddle as hard as possible for 30 seconds. So during each session the subjects were conducting up to three minutes of hard exercise. 
7. After the six training sessions, we asked the subjects to do the test again. How do you think they did? They were able to last  twice as long as last time. The subjects had doubled their endurance time on average. 
8. In less than 20 minutes of hard exercise these young men and women had doubled their ability to pedal against a fixed resistance.  
9. Encouraged by the results of the potency of ultra short bursts of exercise, scientists are exploring what is called "The One Minute Workout". Because it amounts to just three hard sprints of 20 seconds each. In a study of  two groups of out of shape people, one group did  the one-minute workout three times a week for 12 weeks. That was the 320 seconds sprints conducted within about ten minutes, for a total of three minutes of very hard exercise. The other group did the exercise guidelines. (A 150 minutes a week of continuous aerobic exercise.) And the benefits were compared
10. After 12 weeks, both groups increased their fitness by about the same amount. 
11. It is  possible for everyday non-athletic sedentary individuals to derive the cardio-respiratory benefits of the exercise guidelines, three 50-minute sessions per week with just a single minutes worth of hard exercise, performed three times per week. 
12. The improvement in cardio-respiratory fitness was the same in both groups. An increase of 19 percent on average. It all goes to show how little exercises required to produce enormous benefits if you're willing and able to work hard.