Is 5-Minute Daily Workout Really enough?
If you don’t have time to exercise today, you should skip it, right? Incorrect!
If you don’t have time to exercise today, you should skip it, right? Incorrect! You can reap the benefits of your training with sweat sessions as short as five minutes. You read that right: five minutes. Still skeptical? Read on to learn more about how micro-exercises can promote health and strengthen your body.
Does a 5-minute workout help?
You’ve probably never thought about exercising for just five minutes. Sounds like there isn’t enough time to make a change. Finally, the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion says aerobic activity lasting more than 10 minutes counts toward 150 minutes of moderate-intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity per week. But that doesn’t mean shorter, high-intensity workouts don’t help.
The benefits of regular exercise include everything from weight loss to better sleep to boosting energy levels. Staying healthy can also do a lot for your self-confidence. So, should nothing count towards this goal? Well, researchers have found that even a minute of exercise can help you stay fit and active.
All of these little exercises you do throughout the day can add up to a big difference, according to a University of Utah study. In fact, even a minute of “brisk” exercise can have a noticeable effect.
Compared with the control group, women who incorporated short periods of high-intensity activity into their daily lives had a slight decrease in body mass index (BMI). Men had similar results. The calories burned during this short but intense workout make women about 1/2 pound lighter than their inactive peers.
Men and women who did these quick workouts also had a lower chance of being obese. The key is to increase the intensity of whatever you do, not just focus on the duration.
Another study, published in Obesity, found that breaking up exercise into smaller chunks makes sense when it comes to controlling appetite. One group of overweight participants exercised for an hour a day, while the other group completed 12 five-minute sessions. Both groups ended up having similar levels of the protein in their blood, which controls appetite.
However, the group who exercised for short periods of time said they felt an average of 32 percent more full during the day. In other words, her satiety increased with intermittent workouts as short as five minutes.
You may also have heard of a training called tabata. The Tabata workout is actually a four-minute high-intensity interval workout consisting of 20 seconds of effort and 10 seconds of rest, repeated eight times. The name comes from the authors of an interval training study published in 1996. The results of this study show that short interval training greatly improves the body’s anaerobic and aerobic systems.
Incorporate exercise into your daily routine
This all sounds great, but you might feel like you can’t even exercise for five minutes with your busy schedule. Or maybe you just want to take a break when you finally have some free time. No one says staying healthy is easy, but it doesn’t have to be impossible either.
Originally published at https://todayscope.net on December 15, 2021.
