With the new year, we all want to achieve some personal milestones. And perhaps the most popular new year’s wish is to exercise. Now, a study from Boston University shows that short, intense trains can improve fitness far more than light exercise, such as walking 10,000 steps a day.

We spend all day in front of the screen, in the office or teleworking, and it’s often a miracle if we manage to squeeze half an hour out of our day to do sport. However, these 30 minutes may be the key to making up for eight hours of work. Researchers at Boston University School of Medicine, led by Dr Matthew Nayor, have analysed the effort of more than 2,000 people and concluded that exercise is always healthy, of course, but if you train hard and short you get a better result.

“We have found that, in improving the body, intense activity, but with less time of effort, is more efficient than walking.” Dr Nayor, who is also a practicing cardiologist at Boston Medical Center, the city’s leading teaching hospital, says in an article in the World Economic Forum that “the negative effect of a sedentary lifestyle on fitness can be offset by very high levels of activity.”

From the study, published in the ‘European Heart Journal’, the researchers also found that, curiously, high activity values and low values, both eight years apart, have equivalent levels of fitness. “This suggests there may be a memory effect,” Nayor says. Without discouraging people from meeting the 10,000 steps a day, the scientists show that intense effort is three times more efficient than just walking.

The milestone: 75 minutes of intense exercise per week

Thus, in an exercise chart, the researchers consider a low-level exercise such as walking to be between 60 and 99 steps per minute, a moderate level to be between 100 and 129 steps per minute, and an intense level to be more than 130 steps per minute.

With this classification, researchers recommend either 150-300 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 75-150 minutes a week of intense exercise, i.e. 25-50 minutes three days a week. With either routine, we will get the same physical results. So, welcome to New Year’s wishes!

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