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

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

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

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are somewhat dismissive about the results, they really only confirm many other studies which found that HIT (High intensity training, what is discussed in the article) training achieves the same effects as much longer endurance training at much shorter times. This has been found for both non-athletes and athletes and in fact training for professional endurance athletes has drastically changed in the last 5-…

Do you have references for this? My understanding is that low heart rate training is still standard for elite endurance athletes.

How many people benefitting from more exercise are elite endurance athletes?

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

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

50W is nothing, and 500W isn’t really a sprint. For an adult male, you should be pushing 1000-2000 over 20 second sprints. Walking slightly uphill is probably more intense than a 50w bike.

So? If the article says 50/500W then I’d say that’s the best objective description of the effort level.

The question is whether 500W counts as high intensity, and whether the results are applicable for people whose high intensity is 2 to 4 times higher than the test subjects. I have to admit that I didn't read the linked article, but previous similar ones had the low intensity reference at so low intensity it shouldn't be a surprise to anyone that it didn't produce any results.

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

#163
I went from virtually no exercise to moderate exercise for 15min, 4 to 6 times a week. Mostly 2 to 3 minute rounds on a heavy punching bag. I wouldn't call it life changing from a physical point of view, at least not yet. But the mental benefits were there from the first month.

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

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> In conclusion, if you're out of shape, you can improve a limited number of fitness measures just as much doing 3x8 minutes of higher intensity exercise as much 3×45m less intense exercise over 12 weeks This seems like a pretty negative reading. How about: Sedentary people (who have the most issues and highest healthcare costs), can see significant improvements in health by exercising for a fraction of time normally…

It's a win _if_ the barrier to getting sedentary people to improve their health through fitness is time cost and not all of the other costs associated with habit formation. My guess is for most sedentary people the biggest thing is that they manage to talk themselves out of doing anything, or once they start, talk themselves into allowing cheating/skipping rather than drilling in the habit. (Not that this is bad news…

Time cost is one of the major obstacles for more than just the reason of "it takes this X minutes out of your week". If you tell me I have to spend 45 minutes doing exercise 3 times a week my mind will be filled with excuses and the dread of how exhausted I will feel after 45 minutes and how it will likely be more like a 2 hour time commitment every time I do it. It's a much easier sell to say: 10 minutes where you're only spending 1 minute of time doing something intense and the rest is spent doing something quite light.

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

#165
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are somewhat dismissive about the results, they really only confirm many other studies which found that HIT (High intensity training, what is discussed in the article) training achieves the same effects as much longer endurance training at much shorter times. This has been found for both non-athletes and athletes and in fact training for professional endurance athletes has drastically changed in the last 5-…

> without making your calorie intake less than your expenditure you will not loose weight I've asked on HN a couple times in the past for citations that support this meme and haven't yet found a good source on this. The connection between caloric restriction and weight loss isn't as straight forward as people seem to think, despite that being the standard correlation pushed since the 1950s. Calories seems to be the c…

https://www.totalwellbeingdiet.com/media/2266/18-00521-secre...

https://www.publish.csiro.au/RD/RD20326

The CSIRO has been researching for decades as to what the best bang for buck is with regards exercise.

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

#166
post #36
post #24

The study apparently only involved male participants. The control group consists of 6, the two treatment groups of 10 and 9 participants. The total N of the study is 25 participants. They conduct a one-way ANOVA on the interaction of time and treatment group indicators. I conclude that the study is woefully underpowered. I do not trust the apparent significance of their results.

I really don't understand statistics. My interpretation of "the study is under-powered" is that since the study has so small groups it will be difficult to find any result that is statistically significant. But wouldn't that mean that for any effect to be significant the effect size would have to be huge? My hunch is that if you have a large enough group even very small effect sizes will be significant, but in small…

(See bio for my background) All of the replies you've gotten so far are very good and I upvoted all of them.

In particular:

cuchoi acknowledges the publication bias version of the risk here. Let's say your average effect is 1 unit with a confidence interval that is 0.9 units at a desired level of confidence. We can interpret this confident interval two different ways: one is that assuming 1 unit is the true effect, then repeated sampling would produce a sampling distribution of estimate effects that span 0.1 to 1.9 at the desired level of confidence. Another is assuming that, say, 0.1 was the true effect, effects as large as the one we see (1 unit) would occur a non-trivial portion of the time. Now, imagine many researchers do this experiment and the true effect is 0.1. Some researchers find negative effects, some find small effects that are not significant, others do larger studies and find small effects that are significant, others find larger effects. Now, imagine the journal will only publish effects that are both statistically significant and substantively interesting. The only person that submits for publishing is the version of the study that finds the large effect (1 unit). cuchoi is very correct to suggest that when your design can only find large effects, the published effect will likely be overestimated.

fpoling and sandgiant highlight the sensitivity risk argument. Suppose that the outcome is heavily sensitive to some confounders (socioeconomic status, nutrition, smoking status, race, etc.) And suppose poor people are slightly more likely to get treatment, just from coin flip chance. Because poverty correlates with both the effect and the probability of being treated (even though you tried to assign randomly), some of the visible effect is the relationship between poverty and treatment, not effect and outcome. There are designs other than simple randomization that try to explicitly deal with known confounders, but they can't deal with unknown confounders. Larger sample sizes mitigate the risk of imbalance of both known and unknown confounders.

Everyone is doing great!

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

#167
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are somewhat dismissive about the results, they really only confirm many other studies which found that HIT (High intensity training, what is discussed in the article) training achieves the same effects as much longer endurance training at much shorter times. This has been found for both non-athletes and athletes and in fact training for professional endurance athletes has drastically changed in the last 5-…

> without making your calorie intake less than your expenditure you will not loose weight I've asked on HN a couple times in the past for citations that support this meme and haven't yet found a good source on this. The connection between caloric restriction and weight loss isn't as straight forward as people seem to think, despite that being the standard correlation pushed since the 1950s. Calories seems to be the c…

If I cut my calorie intake by a moderate amount, I don't lose any fat. If I cut my calorie intake by an extreme amount, I start to lose fat.

My hypothesis is that the equation that weight loss is related to calorie intake minus expenditure, but I think the conclusions one draws from it fail to take into account how much the body can control expenditure.

My body seems to naturally drift up in fat weight, very slowly -- probably around a pound per year -- no matter how much I eat. If I cut calories a lot, I can lose fat. After that, my fat level drifts back up to the old target weight pretty quickly, and then up slowly again. I'm pretty sure if I plotted my fat from the time I became an adult, it would be a pretty straight line, with short-term dips and recoveries for diets.

Losing weight sustainably would mean resetting that target somehow. I don't know how. Changing my diet and exercise levels don't seem to do much for fat levels (but do more for my general fitness and health).

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

#168
post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A part of that weight gain is caused by no longer burning let's say an additional 500 calories a day from cycling, another part is due to lack of activity and muscle atrophy lowering your base metabolic rate. And all of this accounts to one thing: you eat too much for a sedentary lifestyle. Cycling just allows you to compensate. So, sure, exercise helps at a certain point. But, take into account: * If you're fat, you…

It's 'basal metabolic rate' not 'base', and it's not going to change materially over a year, even with a shift to inactivity.

Muscle atrophy from not maintaining exercise for a year will absolutely make your BMR change. In the same way, spend a year at the gym lifting weights and your BMR will absolutely go up, even if at the same weight.

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

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exercise doesn't result in changes in body mass (weight loss), unless accompanied with a diet. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2016/jan/28/study-reveal... .

Like the saying goes, you can't out-train a bad diet (unless you're a complete outlier like Eddie Hall or Micheal Phelps or DK Metcalf). This is a good podcast on the topic as well: https://www.artofmanliness.com/health-fitness/health/new-sci...

Reading about the diet of DK Metcalf that is Low carb, Intermittent fasting, with plenty of vegetables is according to the latest science. Eddie Hall has goal based diets, Normal people wouldn't be able to process the amount of food he eats, can't be healthy to eat that much. But at the same time it's clearly working for him. Just saying genetics does a disservice to them.

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

#170
post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While you are somewhat dismissive about the results, they really only confirm many other studies which found that HIT (High intensity training, what is discussed in the article) training achieves the same effects as much longer endurance training at much shorter times. This has been found for both non-athletes and athletes and in fact training for professional endurance athletes has drastically changed in the last 5-…

> without making your calorie intake less than your expenditure you will not loose weight I've asked on HN a couple times in the past for citations that support this meme and haven't yet found a good source on this. The connection between caloric restriction and weight loss isn't as straight forward as people seem to think, despite that being the standard correlation pushed since the 1950s. Calories seems to be the c…

You are very right to question this!

While the thermodynamics aren't assailable, it turns out that the calorie system is in fact quite fallable and bad!

There's a lot of good material on why, I like this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aJQxadvsmEQ

But simply put:

- Our system for measuring how much "calorie" is in any given food is extremely problematic and unrelated to how the body captures energy

- Our system for estimating how much "calorie" a human body uses is extremely problematic and error-ridden.

- Our systemized ignorance towards the relationship in the body between energy storage and energy consumption, as well as all the factors influencing this system. The same advice or strategy simply doesn't work the same way for two people. But our advice and labels can't capture that.

As we engineers know "garbage in, garbage out". Well, when all of the data in this system is garbage, it's no surprise that the function outputs garbage.

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