Support Pullquote, upgrade to Pro!
(Or just tweet your Pullquote for free!)
With Pullquote Pro, you'll get to:
- share on Facebook
- schedule tweets
- tweet from multiple accounts
- edit quotes
- customize colors
- change fonts
- save and index quotes
- private quotes
Choose a plan: $5/month $50/year (includes free access to any new features)
Recent quotes:
Single Bouts of HIIT Exercise Boost Brain Power - Neuroscience News
New research finds that even single bouts of intense exercise can improve cognitive performance in young adults, particularly in memory, attention, and executive functioning. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) and cycling yielded the most substantial cognitive benefits, especially when lasting under 30 minutes. While the cognitive boost was modest, it suggests that brief, vigorous exercise may have a more immediate effect on brain function than previously thought.
Keeping fit with HIIT really does work: Short bursts of activity you can easily do at home keep your fitness up -- ScienceDaily
The findings of this study show that low-volume HIIT (typically involving less than ~20 mins total exercise time -- inclusive of warm up and cool down) yields comparable improvements to interventions meeting the current guidelines despite requiring significantly less time.
So, what is low-volume HIIT? As HIIT involves active periods of work interspersed with recovery periods, the researchers defined low-volume HIIT as interventions which included less than 15 minutes of high intensity exercise per session (not including recovery periods).
This review builds on the authors' recent study published in Diabetes Care which showed that as little as 4-min of HIIT 3 times per week for 12 weeks significantly improved blood sugar levels, fat in the liver, and cardiorespiratory fitness in adults with type 2 diabetes. They also showed that these improvements were comparable to an intervention involving 45-min of moderate intensity aerobic exercise (2).
Can 4 Seconds of Exercise Make a Difference? - The New York Times
So, they recruited 39 of them, men and women aged 50 to 68 who were sedentary but had no other major health concerns. They tested the volunteers’ current aerobic fitness, muscular power and mass, arterial flexibility, and ability to perform what are called “activities of daily living,” such as getting up out of a chair.
The volunteers began visiting the performance lab three times a week. There, they completed a brief workout of repeated four-second intervals on the lab’s specialized bikes. At first, they sprinted for four seconds, with Dr. Allen calling out a second-by-second countdown, followed by 56 seconds of rest, repeating that sequence 15 times, for a total of 60 seconds of intervals.
Over two months, though, the riders’ rest periods declined to 26 seconds and they increased their total number of sprints to 30 per session.
At the end of eight weeks, the scientists retested everyone and found substantial differences. On average, riders had increased their fitness by about 10 percent, gained considerable muscle mass and strength in their legs, reduced the stiffness of their arteries and outperformed their previous selves in activities of daily living, all from about three to six minutes a week of actual exercise.
High and low exercise intensity found to influence brain function differently: Study suggests that exercise could play a role as a therapeutic strategy in neurological and psychiatric disorders -- ScienceDaily
The behavioral data showed a significant increase in positive mood after both exercise intensities and no significant change in negative mood. The results of the Rs-fMRI tests showed that low-intensity exercise led to increased functional connectivity in networks associated with cognitive processing and attention. High-intensity exercise, on the other hand, led to increased functional connectivity in networks related to affective, emotional processes. High-intensity exercise also led to a decreased functional connectivity in networks associated with motor function.
Crunched for time? High-intensity exercise gives same cell benefits in fewer minutes: Mitochondrial changes similar in short sprint exercise versus longer moderate-intensity workouts -- ScienceDaily
In addition, the research team found that fewer minutes of higher-intensity exercise produced similar mitochondrial responses compared to a longer moderate-intensity activity. "A total of only two minutes of sprint interval exercise was sufficient to elicit similar responses as 30 minutes of continuous moderate-intensity aerobic exercise," the researchers wrote. "This suggests that exercise may be prescribed according to individual preferences while still generating similar signals known to confer beneficial metabolic adaptions. These findings have important implications for improving our understanding of how exercise can be used to enhance metabolic health in the general population."
Sustained aerobic exercise increases adult neurogenesis in brain -- ScienceDaily
The results indicate that the highest number of new hippocampal neurons was observed in rats that ran long distances and that also had a genetic predisposition to benefit from aerobic exercise: Compared to sedentary animals, HRT rats that ran voluntarily on a running wheel had 2-3 times more new hippocampal neurons at the end of the experiment. Resistance training had no such effect. Also the effects of HIT were minor. To conclude, only sustained aerobic exercise improved hippocampal neurogenesis in adult animals.
