Can 7 minutes exercise get good health?
Rigorous workouts lasting as little as three minutes may
help prevent diabetes by helping control blood sugar, British researchers said
on Wednesday.
"This is such a brief amount of exercise you can do it without breaking a
sweat," said James Timmons, an exercise biologist at Heriot-Watt
University in Edinburgh, who led the study.
"You can make just as big as an effect doing this as you can by doing hours
and hours of endurance training each week." Type 2 diabetes, which affects
an estimated 246 million adults worldwide and accounts for 6 percent of all
global deaths, is a condition in which the body gradually loses the ability to
use insulin properly to convert food to energy.
Very strict diet and vigorous, regular and sustained exercise can reverse type
2 diabetes, but this can be difficult for many people. The condition is closely
linked to inactivity.
Timmons and his team showed that just seven minutes of exercise each week
helped a group of 16 men in their early twenties control their insulin. The
volunteers, who were relatively out of shape but otherwise healthy, rode an
exercise bike four times daily in 30 second spurts two days a week. After two
weeks, the young men had a 23 percent improvement in how effectively their body
used insulin to clear glucose, or blood sugar, from the blood stream, Timmons
said.
The effect appears to last up to 10 days after the last round of exercise, he
added in a telephone interview. "The simple idea is if you are doing tense
muscle contractions during sprints or exercise on a bike you really enhance
insulin's ability to clear glucose out of the bloodstream," Timmons said.
But Timmons said getting people to exercise even a little could translate into
big savings for health systems that spend hundreds of million of dollars
treating diabetes.
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