1min high-intensity exercise 3x a week improves fitness as much as 3x aerobics (2016)

The title is not really honest, it’s a 10 min “commitment”. If you frame it correctly, the result isn’t that surprising

...in sedentary men

From the abstract:

> We investigated whether sprint interval training (SIT) was a time-efficient exercise strategy to improve insulin sensitivity and other indices of cardiometabolic health to the same extent as traditional moderate-intensity continuous training […]

Researchers are not claiming improved overall fitness as the Hacker News title seems to suggest.

The fact that 1 minute of high intensity exercise (in 10 minutes of lower-intensity stuff) is as good as 50 minutes of moderate-intensity training does really put things into perspective.

What I wonder now is - what if you combine both? What if you do 50 minutes of moderate exercise but intersperse that with that same 1 minute of all-out sprints?

Is there a bigger benefit, or is it inconsequential?

And another question, one that I couldn't tell from looking at the page: What about a control group doing 10-minute moderate exercise? It'd be great to compare the 10-minute moderate vs the 10-minute with the high-intensity exercise. Since these were sedentary men, it stands to reason the there's a big amount of low-hanging fruit that might well be captured by the simple 10 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise. I'm sure it won't fare as well as the 50 minute group, but if it's close enough to be statistically insignificant, the conclusion would change to "any exercise is better than no exercise, even 10 minutes of moderate whatever".

True, that seems a bit misleading. But what is fitness if not something that can be measured as "indices of cardiometabolic health"?