The Secret to Longevity? 4-Minute Bursts of Intense Exercise May Help

The New York Times reports on results from a rigorous five-year study in Trondheim, Norway that raises the question: If you increase your heart rate, will your life span follow? The study, one of the largest and longest-term experimental examinations to date of exercise and mortality, shows that older men and women who exercise in almost any fashion are relatively unlikely to die prematurely. But if some of that exercise is intense, the study also finds, the risk of early mortality declines even more, and the quality of people's lives climbs... Their first step was to invite every septuagenarian in Trondheim to participate... More than 1,500 of the Norwegian men and women accepted... All agreed to start and continue to exercise more regularly during the upcoming five years... The first group, as a control, agreed to follow standard activity guidelines and walk or otherwise remain in motion for half an hour most days. (The scientists did not feel they could ethically ask their control group to be sedentary for five years.) Another group began exercising moderately for longer sessions of 50 minutes twice a week. And the third group started a program of twice-weekly high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, during which they cycled or jogged at a strenuous pace for four minutes, followed by four minutes of rest, with that sequence repeated four times... During that time, the scientists noted that quite a few of the participants in the control had dabbled with interval-training classes at local gyms, on their own initiative and apparently for fun... After five years, the researchers checked death registries and found that about 4.6 per cent of all of the original volunteers had passed away during the study, a lower number than in the wider Norwegian population of 70-year-olds, indicating these active older people were, on the whole, living longer than others of their age. But they also found interesting, if slight, distinctions between the groups. The men and women in the high-intensity-intervals group were about 2 per cent less likely to have died than those in the control group, and 3 per cent less likely to die than anyone in the longer, moderate-exercise group. People in the moderate group were, in fact, more likely to have passed away than people in the control group. The men and women in the interval group also were more fit now and reported greater gains in their quality of life than the other volunteers.... Dorthe Stensvold, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who led the new study, believes the study's message can be broadly applicable to almost all of us.. "Adding life to years, not only years to life, is an important aspect of healthy ageing, and the higher fitness and health-related quality of life from high-intensity interval training in this study is an important finding."

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