Busy people, listen up: What if you could push yourself to the max for just one minute and reap the benefits of a longer gym session?

That’s the finding of a new Canadian study, which shows doing just 60 seconds of intense sprint intervals offers the same health benefits as 45 minutes of less-strenuous continuous exercise — further reinforcing the benefits of trendy high-intensity interval training, or HIIT.

The 12-week McMaster University study focused on two groups of inactive men, with one group doing sprint interval training and the other doing continuous workouts. Both groups improved their peak oxygen uptake — a key measure of cardiovascular fitness and aerobic power — by nearly 20 per cent, “even though one group did fivefold less exercise with a fivefold lower time commitment,” says senior author Martin Gibala, professor and chair of McMaster’s department of kinesiology.

Both groups of men trained on bicycles three times a week for the course of the study. The interval-based group had a time commitment of 10 minutes for each session, broken into a two-minute warm-up, a 20-second burst, a two-minute recovery, another 20-second burst, another two-minute recovery, a final 20-second burst, followed by a three-minute cool-down.

Those three 20-second bursts totalled just one minute of intense exercise, while the recovery, warm-up, and cool-down periods were all at a gentle pace.

In contrast, the second group had a time commitment of 50 minutes of continuous exercise for each session, which included a 45-minute workout plus warm-up and cool-down time at the beginning and end.

That means a big difference in time commitment over a week: Just 30 minutes of exercise for the interval group and 150 minutes of exercise for the others. (There was a control group as well.)

The study was on the small side — just 25 participants — and didn’t involve women, although Gibala says his team is working on parallel female research. Still, he says it’s one of his most comprehensive studies to date, and innovative in its head-to-head comparison between small-dose sprint training and the traditional approach.

Originally published at TORONTOSTAR