If you could exercise for 6 minutes a week and achieve the same results as the gym rat who works out for 1.5 hours 3x/wk, would you? Well, I’m sure there would be a handful of people who would differ from me, but I would gladly trade my 5 to 7 hr workout/week for a 6 minute one.

Current research on healthy, non-athletes at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada is showing this to be the case. Building on previous research done with rats at the National Institute of Health and Nutrition in Japan, the Department of Kinesiology headed by Martin Gibala, PhD has shown that endurance levels were the same (as measured in a stationary bike timed trial).

One group of students trained between 1.5 to 2 hours 3x/wk on a stationary bike at a specified pace based on the long held belief that to build endurance, one had to do endurance-type activities. The second group of students instead trained to maximum intensity for 20 to 30 seconds followed by a rest period of 4 minutes. This cycle was repeated 4-6 times. At the end of 2 weeks, there was little difference between the two groups.

Now, I’m up at 4:40 a.m. just so that I can get my hour of exercise in before work and I can tell you that I have deeply ambivalent feelings about this. Most mornings I drag myself out of bed. Now by my calculations, my workout time would amount to 26 minutes of which 24 minutes would be rest time (that just brought a big smile to my face).

Can that time be reduced even further? Gibala is studying whether a 2-3 minute intensely grueling workout will achieve the same results as the 20-30 second repetitions and he hopes these results will be ready by the fall of 2009.

I’m going to experiment with this and try these intense 20-30 second repetitions and see how I fare at the end of 2 weeks. If anyone else wants to try this out, I’d love to hear about your results.