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288 - Just Minutes of Daily Vigorous Exercise Improve Heart Health

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Curt:
MedScape, Carolyn Brown. December 24, 2024
https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/just-minutes-daily-vigorous-exercise-improve-heart-health-2024a1000p2r?ecd=WNL_trdalrt_pos1_ous_241226_etid7120450&uac=305958HN&impID=7120450

[Simple short burst 20-30 seconds (HIIT). This does not negate getting regular frequent exercise during the week. It simply tells us that short sustained burst of physical activity with heart rate accelerated are very beneficial for heart health]

Middle-aged women who did many short bursts of vigorous-intensity exercise — amounting to as little as 3 min/d — had a 45% lower risk for major adverse cardiovascular events, reported investigators.

This doesn’t mean just a walk in the park, explained Emmanuel Stamatakis, PhD, a researcher with the University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. He said the activity can be as short as 20-30 seconds, but it must be high intensity — “movement that gets us out of breath, gets our heart rate up” — and repeated several times daily.

Stamatakis and his colleagues call this type of exercise vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity, and it involves intense movement in very short bouts that are part of daily life, like a quick stair climb or running for a bus.

In their study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, most exercise bursts were less than a minute, and few were over 2 minutes.

In this study, women who did even less than 2 minutes of vigorous physical activity a day but no other exercise had a lower risk for all major cardiovascular events and for heart attack and heart failure. Women who did the median daily vigorous exercise time — 3.4 minutes — had an even lower risk. In fact, in women, there was a direct relationship between daily exercise time and risk reduction.

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