Can three minutes of exercise a week help make you fit?

A few relatively short bursts of intense exercise, amounting to only a few minutes a week, can deliver many of the health and fitness benefits of hours of conventional exercise, according to new research, says Dr Michael Mosley. But how much benefit you get from either may well depend on your genes.
Genetic test
So if I could improve my insulin sensitivity and my aerobic fitness then that should improve my general health. But Jamie said there was a potential sting in the tail. There was a possibility that I wouldn't improve. Not because HIT doesn't work but because I've inherited the wrong genes.

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The fact is that people respond to exercise in very different ways. In one international study 1,000 people were asked to exercise four hours a week for 20 weeks. Their aerobic fitness was measured before and after starting this regime and the results were striking.Although 15% of people made huge strides (so-called "super-responders"), 20% showed no real improvement at all ("non-responders").

There is no suggestion that the non-responders weren't exercising properly, it was simply that the exercise they were doing was not making them any aerobically fitter.


Full throttle
It's actually very simple. You get on an exercise bike, warm up by doing gentle cycling for a couple of minutes, then go flat out for 20 seconds.

A couple of minutes to catch your breath, then another 20 seconds at full throttle. Another couple of minutes gentle cycling, then a final 20 seconds going hell for leather. And that's it.

So how does it work? According to Jamie, and other researchers I spoke to, part of the explanation is (probably) that HIT uses far more of our muscle tissue than classic aerobic exercise.When you do HIT, you are using not just the leg muscles, but also the upper body including arms and shoulders, so that 80% of the body's muscle cells are activated, compared to 20-40% for walking or moderate intensity jogging or cycling.
Active exercise also seems to be needed to break down the body's stores of glucose, deposited in your muscles as a substance called glycogen. Smash up these glycogen stores and you create room for more glucose to be sucked out of the blood and stored.

Somewhat sceptical I went off and dutifully did my four weeks of HIT, making a grand total of 12 minutes of intense exercise and 36 minutes of gentle pedalling. I then went back to the lab to be retested.
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The results were mixed. My insulin sensitivity had improved by a remarkable 24%, which was extremely satisfying, but my aerobic fitness had not improved at all.