(Alex Hutchinson/ Globe and Mail) – Martin Gibala is calling your bluff.
The McMaster University kinesiology professor, whose research helped spark a worldwide surge of interest in short, sharp, high-intensity interval workouts, and who co-authored a 2017 book called The One-Minute Workout, has upped the ante yet again. His newest study finds that dashing up a staircase for just 20 seconds, repeated a few times a day, can measurably improve your fitness.
The reason this matters is that “lack of time” often crops up as an excuse when scientists try to figure out why so few of us get as much exercise as we know we should. Gibala and others have been whittling away at this excuse for more than a decade now, designing ever more time-efficient workouts.
“I certainly don’t think we are going to get much lower in terms of the minimum dose of activity that can yield measurable benefits,” Gibala says of his latest results. (…)