Making Short Work of Endurance Training

Last week the New York Times published an article commenting on recent research that suggests that short, intense training can be as effective as long slow training for improving endurance.

Can You Get Fit in Six Minutes a Week?

But as we contemplate the likelihood of Arthur Lydiard cursing from the grave, let's consider some of this research. In one study....

"...researchers at the National Institute of Health and Nutrition in Japan put rats through a series of swim tests with surprising results. They had one group of rodents paddle in a small pool for six hours... a second group of rats were made to stroke furiously through short, intense bouts of swimming, while carrying ballast to increase their workload."

The researchers discovered that the short intense rat workouts were just as effective at improving endurance as the long, slow workouts. The article does not comment on how the rats felt to be tossed in water with ballast tied to them (Training log: Friday, June 26 - thrown into water with weights tied to my feet; paddled furiously for a minute to escape drowning. Finally, my coach took me out of the water, but then threw me in again after a 30-second rest... The other rats say that if training were easy it would be called my mom... How do they know my mom?)

In another study,

"...Martin Gibala's group at the Department of Kinesiology at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada... had a group of college students, who were healthy but not athletes, ride a stationary bike at a sustainable pace for between 90 and 120 minutes. Another set of students grunted through a series of short, strenuous intervals: 20 to 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand.... 'for a total of two to three minutes of very intense exercise per training session,' Gibala says."

"After two weeks, both groups showed almost identical increases in their endurance (as measured in a stationary bicycle time trial), even though the one group had exercised for six to nine minutes per week, and the other about five hours."

The article does point out that one potential problem with short, intense workouts is that it requires a lot of motivation (even for a drowning rat) to exercise at the highest intensity you can stand. It also could be argued that such exercise might lead to injury, although it seems to me that the same could be said of doing long-distance running, say, instead of sprints.

I have a suspicion there's less in these studies than meets the eye. It sounds like a miracle to be able to exercise for one-tenth the time and get the same benefits. But the extreme forms of exercise used in the comparison are kind of misleading, as most people train with a balance of intense and less intense workouts. And the idea of short, intense work efforts is nothing new. Paavo Nurmi pioneered the use of interval workouts on the track. Emil Zatopek proved you could create a LONG workout from short sprints, regularly running 40 or more 400s a day for days on end. I have a book from the early 50's written by Fred Wilt that recommends that even novice high school runners start with lots of short, fast runs, rather than long jogs.

And even Lydiard thought there was a time and place for 200m sprints.

But I've got another problem with the tone of the article: whether we're talking about novices or experienced athletes, exercise and training aren't only about getting short term gains, they're about building a long-term foundation of health and fitness. It sounds like this focus on intensity is just one more symptom of people looking for a quick solution to achieving fitness. After a while, the overwrought enthusiasm for this or that "perfect" workout sounds to my ears indistinguishable from those late-night commercials hyping Bowflex or some other exercise machine for toning away fat in just minutes a day.

I'm all for being efficient, and I don't believe in training more just because more is always better; it's not. But I'm betting that when all the research is done, fitness will still require more than six minutes a day, no matter how intense those six minutes.