Stuck for time or space to exercise? a newly published to study can have the training for you.
Start by lifting your knees up one at a time, like a puppet rearing up. Then squat, jump, lunge and burpee for five minutes of calisthenics, with a few minutes of walking in between. She will get as much exercise as if she had run on a treadmill at the gym, but without leaving her living room or work cubicle.
The study is one of the first to look at whether rapid bodyweight training “can be called high-intensity exercise,” said Gabriella Bellissimo, a doctoral candidate at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, who led the new study.
The study suggests the answer is yes. The results show that you can get an effective aerobic and strength workout at home, or on the go, in less time than it would take to grab a cup of coffee. The workout consists of five simple exercises: high knees, jump squats, scissors, jump lunges, and modified burpees (no push-ups required).
There is one caveat: You must perform the exercises, or simplified variations of them, with sufficient enthusiasm and vigor.
Do each exercise vigorously for one minute, then walk or move gently in place for one minute. Scroll down to find easier versions of each exercise.
To find out if this five-exercise bodyweight workout was as effective as running in the gym, Bellissimo and his colleagues recruited 12 healthy, active men and women in their 20s and 30s. In a day, they were asked to sprint through a typical version of intervals, running on a treadmill at top speed for one minute and then walking for another minute. Participants repeated this run/walk interval five times, rested for two minutes, and then went through the entire workout again. Each round of exercise took 11 minutes.
On another day, the exercise transitioned to the five common movements designed to test the lower body. The volunteers jumped and dashed through as many of each exercise as they could complete in one minute, stood in place for one minute, and then moved on to the next exercise. After resting for two minutes at the end, they repeated the routine.
During both workouts, the scientists monitored people’s heart rates, oxygen consumption, and feelings of how hard the effort felt. They then asked how much people enjoyed each workout and checked for muscle soreness in the following days.
The result? Both workouts substantially increased people’s heart rate and oxygen consumption, meaning they both constituted effective aerobic exercise. There were slight differences. Treadmill sprints required more oxygen, suggesting they might stress the cardiovascular system and increase endurance a bit more than bodyweight exercises. That workout, on the other hand, caused more pain, indicating that it demanded more muscles from people, which likely resulted in greater gains in leg strength over time. The volunteers also said that the bodyweight routine felt more strenuous, even though it lasted the same minutes as the run.
Overall, the study shows that a basic bodyweight workout “can definitely be called high-intensity exercise,” Bellissimo said. More precisely, he continued, both running and bodyweight workouts count as high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, one of the most popular fitness terms.
In HIIT exercise, a brief period of vigorous exertion alternates with rest. Scientists already knew that treadmill intervals count as HIIT. This study helps establish that calisthenics at home or in a quiet corner of the office or your favorite park also provides intense exercise.
This study was quite small and only measured the effects of a single instance of each of the workouts, said Martin Gibala, a professor of kinesiology at McMaster University in Hamilton, Canada.
Still, “there is value in doing studies like this,” he said. “It’s important to characterize physiological responses” during and after various workouts, to reassure people who may be tempted to jump squats and scissor kicks that their efforts will have the desired effects.
If you want to try bodyweight HIIT, Bellissimo said, feel free to modify or totally readjust the study workout to suit your fitness and circumstances. Do the entire set of exercises just once, instead of twice, for example. Slow down during any of the exercises.
Or, if you’re feeling capable and hyper-competitive, beat the average number of high knees for study participants, which was 185 per minute. Add the push-up burpee, which was not used in this study, if you want to exercise your upper body, or use a chair to make burpees or squats less demanding.
“Try to finish every interval, however you can,” said Bellissimo, who is studying a reduced bodyweight version of HIIT with older people who have health problems. They are tolerating exercise well so far, she said. “The beauty of intervals is that they are intense, yes, but then they are over.”
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