Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health

As an anecdote of one, I was doing moderate intensity endurance exercise for a couple years with only modest improvements in basic cardiovascular metrics that kind of flatlined over time.

As an experiment, I switched to high-intensity interval type training for a couple months, which required about half the time to do. All of my cardiovascular metrics immediately changed in a strongly positive way. When I did the old endurance training, performance was much higher than it had been before the high-intensity training.

It is the strongest positive effect I have ever seen from any exercise/gym theory that has been widely promulgated. I never expected to see my cardiovascular metrics change as quickly or as much as they did.

High-intensity exercise is obviously good, but beware of the trap of doing just high intensity exercise and doing it too frequently - the body does not handle that amount of stress particularly well, and it will be counterproductive to your health.

Low intensity exercise that holds your aerobic base is vital as well - and for a well-rounded exercise week, it should constitute the majority of your exercise time.

That is not to say that you should neglect higher intensities, it's just that you cannot do them as often due to the disproportionate amount of fatigue they generate.

I found that setting a two minute timer and running up and down a stair case with high intensity once per day can resolve a whole host of seemingly unrelated issues.

I like sprinting a couple times up our hill, ca 10s each, 4-6 times. It’s full out, and when I‘m untrained (like now), I‘m quite exhausted afterwards.

But the dopamine boost I get from this is immense. It lasts 24-48h. I‘m in a general good mood for this period. Sometimes, a little more competitive than normal - that’s a downside.

Normal jogging or long walks don’t have this effect, at all.

What about adapting the core principle of "Greasing the groove" to cardiovascular workouts?

At first I thought they found something new, however it is known that exercise intensity should be of various types for the best health outcome. In my training regimen I already have a weekly session of high-intensity training, and other session at a lower intensity.

I know the most physically fit I have ever been was when I was able to do every video of the Insanity workout.

I play Dance Dance Revolution. Doing hard songs in that game is basically the definition of high intensity interval training. And it's fun!

It's interesting that they characterize a 30-second cycling effort as "all-out" when any cyclist knows it's impossible to go "all-out" for that long. You can go really all-out for a few seconds before your whole metabolic process needs to switch modes. A 30-second effort has to be paced. "All-out" intervals are very effective but for me they mean 4 seconds out of every 30 seconds.

Does anyone have a recommendation for a dumb watch (<$100 USD) that has good programmability (flexible alarms) for a HIIT protocol? It would be nice if it had HRM but at that price point, maybe not feasible.

I don't want the fuss or expense of an Android or Apple watch. Garmin makes some nice models but they are still relatively expensive.

The sky is blue.

Cows eat grass.

Film at 11^

^more research needed

TL;DR: for some biomarkers, "sprint-interval exercise" (SIE) bursts as short as 5 min can be as effective as much longer periods of "moderate-intensity exercise" (MIE).

Specifically: MIE consisted of 90-min of continuous cycling at 90%–100% of the predetermined first lactate threshold, while SIE consisted of 6 sets of 30-s all-out cycling at a resistance of 0.075 kg·kg−1 body mass, with 4-min rests between the sets (Figure 1A).

The study's sample size was small and the period studied fairly short, but they did measure the levels of several thousand proteins.