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Conventional wisdom is that regular aerobic exercise reduces risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke and diabetes. But regular aerobic exercise involves a substantial time commitment on the part of the individual. For example American heart association recommends (for persons less than 65 years) moderately intense cardio 30 minutes a day, five days a week. The main issue in compliance with the guidelines is that the time commitment of 30 minutes per day is not possible for every busy individual.

Researchers have found that extremely short duration high intensity exercise regimen improves glycemic control by enhancing insulin action in young healthy males. The exercise regimen used in the study involves 2 weeks of supervised high intensity training comprising of a total of 15 min of exercise in 2 weeks (7.5 min per week). A total of 6 sessions in 2 weeks, with each session lasting 2-3 minutes was completed. Each session comprised of 4–6 × 30-second cycle sprints. Following 2 weeks of training, insulin sensitivity, as measured by the Cederholm index, improved by 23%.

Also earlier extremely short duration high-intensity interval training was demonstrated to produce improvements to aerobic function. Readers should be aware these findings may not be applicable to everyone as the subjects are healthy young males.

Reference: BMC Endocrine Disorders 2009. For further information, visit the following link http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6823/9/3