A central tenet of effective habit formation is to make it easier: a guitar sitting on a stand in your living room is more likely to be played; healthy snacks at the front of the fridge are more likely to be eaten.
That drive to convenience just got a little easier to satisfy with a new study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise. In it, researchers — including Martin Gibala, author of the new The One-Minute Workout — recruited 31 sedentary young women and dropped them into a sprint-interval-training program where they were asked to do several variations of ten-minute exercises, three times a week over six weeks.
One variety — three 20-second bouts of walking up stairs with two minutes of recovery — yielded a 12 percent increase in V02 max, a common measure of respiratory fitness. That’s equivalent to taking the same approach on an exercise bike, but instead of needing fancy equipment, all you need is stairs and feet. Also: Ten minutes a day, three times a week? Sounds like a better use of time than endlessly refreshing Trump news.
