top | item 23021795

Hourly 4-second sprints prevent impairment of postprandial fat metabolism

168 points| wallflower | 6 years ago |journals.lww.com | reply

131 comments

order
[+] Gys|6 years ago|reply
'Hourly 4-second sprints' is actually 5 times an hour 4 secs (bicycle) sprints. So it is more precisely about every 12 minutes. I do not understand why it says 'hourly'? Because it sounds less often?
[+] gdulli|6 years ago|reply
It must be one set of 5 reps per hour, not one sprint every 12 minutes.

That's how exercise usually works, and the study is concerned with the "least amount of exercise that can acutely improve fat metabolism and other aspects of health". Activity spaced out every 12 minutes would be disruptive and defeat that purpose.

[+] tofflos|6 years ago|reply
> This study determined if the interruption of prolonged sitting (i.e.; 8-h of inactivity) with hourly cycling sprints of only 4-s duration each (i.e.; 4-s x 5 per h x 8-h = 160-s per day; SPRINTS) improves PPL. The 4-s sprints employed an inertial load ergometer and were followed by 45-s of seated rest.

So you would need to take a 5 x (4-s sprint + 45-s rest) = 245 seconds exercise break from work every hour and in return you could get the following results?

> No differences (p>0.05) between interventions were found for plasma insulin or glucose AUC. However, SPRINTS displayed a 31% (408±119 vs. 593±88 mg/dL/6h; p=0.009) decrease in plasma triglyceride incremental AUC and a 43% increase in whole body fat oxidation (P=0.001) when compared to SIT.

Does "whole body fat oxidation" mean that the an average male calorie burn of 2500 per day would be multiplied with 1,43 to 3575 calories per day?

[+] mikekchar|6 years ago|reply
> Does "whole body fat oxidation" mean that the an average male calorie burn of 2500 per day would be multiplied with 1,43 to 3575 calories per day?

It seems extremely unlikely to me. I hesitate to bring up the 2nd law of thermodynamics because I know if frustrates a lot of people in these discussions. However, bear with me.

"Calories" in this context refers to kilocalories. Burning 1 kilocalorie produces enough energy to raise 1 kg of water 1 degree C. So burning an extra 1000 kilocalories per day means producing enough heat to raise the body temperature of a 100 kg person 10 degrees over the course of a day. Although our bodies are really good at cooling, that's not an insigificant amount of heat. It's of a magnitude that is relatively easily measured.

If such a phenomenon were to exist, it seems inconceivable to me that the researchers would not try to measure it. I mean it is literally the holy grail of dieting. I think it is considerably more likely that the effect they are measuring is very interesting, but does not extrapolate out to this logical conclusion.

[+] alecco|6 years ago|reply
> Does "whole body fat oxidation" mean that the an average male calorie burn of 2500 per day would be multiplied with 1,43 to 3575 calories per day?

No, it means they burned (oxidized) more fat. This would mostly be a higher % with same calories. Doing those tiny intervals of total 2m40s shouldn't raise significantly the total calorie consumption.

[+] ZeroFries|6 years ago|reply
No it means the amount of calories coming from body fat is increased by 43%, which may amount to nothing over the course of the day if it also simultaneously increases appetite. Almost all forms of weight loss suffer from this problem - the amount of fat lost is generally proportional to the long-term appetite increase, so that 95% of people regain the weight.
[+] renewiltord|6 years ago|reply
Well, presumably you can work while resting. Honestly, I haven't found that to be too hard (I take a mid-day bike ride up the hill here in SF).
[+] Someone|6 years ago|reply
I think we get energy directly out of carbohydrates and proteins, too. If so, that factor will be (¿much?) lower.
[+] swader999|6 years ago|reply
Fairly easy to incorporate this into a pomodoro cadence. Every other break do some high intensity bursts.
[+] bagacrap|6 years ago|reply
2500 calories is way over the average male rmr
[+] huffmsa|6 years ago|reply
Ah, the sprint is being rediscovered once again for it's ability to squeeze maximum effect into minimum working time.

If you get a chance, try to find a copy of "A System of Multi-year Training in Weightlifting" by A.S. Medvedyev (a translation of the 1980s Soviet Olympic Weightlifting program for coaches).

It's the culmination of decades of studies across the entire Soviet athletics program about what works and what doesn't.

The summer programming shifts almost exclusively to sprinting, and only a few hundred meters per day, because that's what they found is enough work for anyone who isn't a specialized running athlete.

I follow it as soon as I can ever summer and it's immediately obvious that my metabolism increases.

IMO the secret about sprinting vs distance running is that your body can't optimize for efficiency. You can marginally increase ATP capacity, but the only thing getting better at maximum effort sprints does is make you able to produce more power while doing maximum effort sprints. It stays hard, without needing to increase volume much over time.

[+] lejboua|6 years ago|reply
Can you plz share how do you incorporate sprints in your training plan?
[+] cjohnson318|6 years ago|reply
"Four men and four women participated in two trials"

I'm not a medical researcher; is this a normal size for a study?

[+] monkeypizza|6 years ago|reply
Say you are trying to distinguish between a placebo and a cyanide pill; test subjects are young rats (base rate of death extremely low). How large of a sample size do you need? I think one control, one test subject is enough to be certain, because the base rate of death is insanely low, when measured on a per-minute basis.

Sample sizes can be small and still very significant when the effect is large.

[+] a3n|6 years ago|reply
Maybe it's a relatively quick and cheap way to decide if it's worth doing larger and longer studies.
[+] mywittyname|6 years ago|reply
Medical research is expensive to conduct, so it's not uncommon to see N<20. Additionally, more data is not necessarily better data since humans lie and it's unethical to force their compliance, so there's more of a risk for bad data with large trials. And throwing out bad data is selection bias.
[+] bcoates|6 years ago|reply
It's enough for such a large effect, but obviously it doesn't tell us anything about the long-term impact of trying it as a lifestyle.
[+] sbr464|6 years ago|reply
I thought the exact same. I honestly think this post should be deleted on that fact.
[+] Drakar1903|6 years ago|reply
And here I thought this was about software development.
[+] zadjii|6 years ago|reply
According to the [site guidelines](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html):

> Hacker News Guidelines

> What to Submit

> On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

> Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

I'd say this falls under "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

[+] exabrial|6 years ago|reply
I'm 7 pounds into the "Covid 15" despite daily exercise. I may give this a try and see if I see results
[+] billmalarky|6 years ago|reply
FWIW it will be easier to lower your caloric intake to align with the lower activity that is a result of lockdown lifestyle than it will be to boost activity to try to match pre-lockdown lifestyle.

Weight control is practically entirely diet. Exercise achieves other health and lifestyle goals.

Furthermore optimizing your diet during lockdown will pay dividends once you go back to a standard level of activity post-lockdown.

Not to say you shouldn't continue daily exercise, point is if you are trying to control your weight you are focusing on the wrong "lever."

[+] knicholes|6 years ago|reply
Right before the pandemic, I entered a body composition challenge that just ended. I lost ten lbs of fat and gained one lb of muscle. Another guy lost 6 lbs of fat and gained 4 lbs of muscle. You can't trust your scale. Go by the scale in addition to how you look, how your clothes fit, and your body measurements.

For better data, get a Dexa body scan.

[+] anentropic|6 years ago|reply
Now that's Agile
[+] davio|6 years ago|reply
We've found that continuous flow works better than 4-second sprints.
[+] puranjay|6 years ago|reply
This study used cycling sprints. I wonder if a similar effect would be observed with say, a set of pushups or squats every hour
[+] chronogram|6 years ago|reply
Leg muscles are a lot larger. You can easily stay warm while cycling or walking at a brisk pace in the winter. Less so when standing still and doing pushups or situps.
[+] alecco|6 years ago|reply
They probably picked cycling because it's easier to measure and there's less variation. And there's much more literature on it (e.g. Tabata/HIIT protocols). I feel squats properly done would be even better as more muscles are involved. With the added benefit of not needing equipment.
[+] huffmsa|6 years ago|reply
Probably. But I think the body gets Abit tricked when the legs come into play in a locomotive fashion.

Particular sprinting. It's primal.

[+] jhaddow|6 years ago|reply
Who has time to do 4s sprints???
[+] wscott|6 years ago|reply
yeah because after my 4s sprint it will take me 20s to walk back to my desk.
[+] neurobashing|6 years ago|reply
It was strange at first, when everyone got their Apple Watch and started standing up, seemingly at random, in meetings. “Gotta meet my stand goal!”

Gonna be really weird when they go tear-assing down the hallway

[+] PacketPaul|6 years ago|reply
Ok 4s/hour. 8 hours/day of sitting. So 32s day of total exercise!?!

Still probably will not do it.

[+] benjaminl|6 years ago|reply
That is also how I initially read it, but the paper states that there were 5 sprints per hours for a total of 160 seconds a day.

From the paper:

> i.e.; 4-s x 5 per h x 8-h = 160-s per day

[+] covidSurvivor19|6 years ago|reply
I mean this sounds way healthier to me than endless cardio. That is much more taxing for the body. This short sprints could certainly spike metabolism without the running out of limiting factors that happens with endurance exercise. Net effect, your body stays in a physiologically high activity state without producing excess stress hormones. Sign me up
[+] zebnyc|6 years ago|reply
Don't we need to warm up before doing any max intensity exercise to prevent injury.
[+] Barrin92|6 years ago|reply
I've read conflicting information about warming up over the years but it at least appears to me that the consensus is slowly moving away from several common exercises such as stretching, which apparently even seems to have negative effects.
[+] sAbakumoff|6 years ago|reply
I am curious if the same effect could be achieved if I just jump on jumping rope for 20 sec every our? I can even jump for a minute!
[+] pazimzadeh|6 years ago|reply
The control group was asked to sit for 8 hours straight, whereas the experimental group sprinted five times. It would be more interesting if they compared it to standing up.
[+] masklinn|6 years ago|reply
> whereas the experimental group sprinted five times

Per hour.

[+] 99_00|6 years ago|reply
If tried an intense exercise, regardless of how long, without warming up I would hurt myself really fast.
[+] jvln|6 years ago|reply
Searching for exercises having an efect and taking as less time as possible looks like panacea.
[+] mirimir|6 years ago|reply
OK, so what's a "4-s sprint"?

I presume that this employs a stationary bicycle. But against what resistance? Also, four seconds hardly seems enough to even reach maximum exertion.

[+] mahesh_rm|6 years ago|reply
Jumping cold out of your couch/chair and sprinting 5 seconds every hour, multiple times a day, sounds to me like an optimized 'quickly destroy most of your body joints' routine.
[+] rkagerer|6 years ago|reply
How about jumping jacks?
[+] rawland|6 years ago|reply
TL;DR:

An hourly ~5min cycling exercise on a stationary bicycle trainer results in a 31% decrease of area under the curve (AUC)* of postprandial triglyceride levels in blood plasma and a 43% increase in whole body fat oxidation.

The cycling exercise consisted of five 4-sec all out sprints followed by 45-sec rests.

The exercise was performed once per hour during 8 hours of sitting and compared to 8 hours of pure sitting.

[*]: https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/132777/what-does-a...