Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health | Hacker News Reader

Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health

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142 pointsqclibre2274 comments

As an anecdote of one, I was doing moderate intensity endurance exercise for a couple years with only modest improvements in basic cardiovascular metrics that kind of flatlined over time.

As an experiment, I switched to high-intensity interval type training for a couple months, which required about half the time to do. All of my cardiovascular metrics immediately changed in a strongly positive way. When I did the old endurance training, performance was much higher than it had been before the high-intensity training.

It is the strongest positive effect I have ever seen from any exercise/gym theory that has been widely promulgated. I never expected to see my cardiovascular metrics change as quickly or as much as they did.

You probably spent all that time training your cardiovascular base, which takes a long time to do. Then, you capped them off with anaerobic gains that were only possible with that prior work.

For optimum gain you should mix moderate exercise with intense exercise, but the time you put in likely made your later success possible.

To be competitive in the sport, you need the pyramid method with the high volume base of light effort, middle of volume of sold effort (e.g. lactate threshold work) and a peak of intensity (e.g. interval training).

This is about health.

High volume of exercise is damaging via oxidative stress and other ways. Weekly training volume is the most reliable predictor for injuries.

If health and basic fitness is the goal, rather than bringing home the gold, you can add intensity to just a fairly small volume of moderate exercise, or perhaps even none at all, other than a warmup and cooldown.

> Weekly training volume is the most reliable predictor for injuries.

Yep! I tend to do too much (because I like exercising), so I have be deliberate about including light training and recovery days. Absolutely necessary for injury avoidance, and frankly overall health benefits.

Exactly.

I did this on purpose this spring.

I had a shitty winter in terms of endurance and was pretty much starting from the gutter in February. Spring and early summer we're stressful so I did mostly Z1/LSD cycling in the form of extended commuting from work to home. Nothing excessive though as stress was plentiful.

The estimated fitness or the Garmin estimate didn't budge much.

Once vacation started I kept this on for few weeks to recover and after that added few harder sessions in a two week period. Few weeks after this I felt the change and Garmin also estimated 6 mil's of added VO2MAX in a week.

Don't care about the metrics, but the added QOL from this and now I hopefully have a structure for the coming winter not to lose as much of this as the previous.

second this

HIIT can have a pretty quick impact on your VO2MAX but that is going to level off. As others have said you will want a more balanced routine in the long run.

It is also possible you were over-training in your "moderate" intensity or conversely not increasing the load/distance enough. Training over years should result in good improvement even without HIIT. You will need to put a lot more time in.

I have a pretty diverse training load these days. Hiking, mountaineering, running, plus a few sports and some resistance. While I have overtrained in the past on running in particular, it was mostly due to lack of diversity. Nonetheless, none of those things puts the same load on the body as HIIT.

To be clear, I was objectively in good cardiovascular condition before adding HIIT. My resting heart rate has been in the 40s for years. The surprise was that there was so much easy margin left by adding HIIT to my regimen.

If your heart rate has been in the 40s for years your cardiovascular system is at the peak of what’s possible. It’s not “pretty good”. A resting heart rate in the 30s is the kind of thing Olympic distance runners touch on. You are either exaggerating or your assessment of what’s normal is way off. Most very fit people have resting rates in the 50s and 60s.

I never implied my cardio fitness was poor, just that some metrics are relatively better than others. My RHR (currently 47-48 per various fitness trackers) has always been pretty elite. I don’t think about it and it doesn’t change much except in response to stress.

I’m more interested in getting into the 90+ percentile range on the cardio metrics where I’m closer to the average. I don’t obsess over it, it is just interesting to see how different activities that I was going to do anyway move the needle.

Or, like me, who has never been a runner, a heart rate in the 30's can mean that you have heart block, an electrical problem with your heart where beats are gradually spaced further apart and then there is a longish delay before a reset. In a recent 2-week heart monitor test, my longest delay was 3 seconds and I had 4 of these. There are different types of heart block: mine is type 1 Mobitz/Wenckebach. Not really dangerous - I've had it all my life and known about it for ~35 years. It shows up on all of the modern automatic heart/blood pressure machines because the delays cause unusually low readings whereas a nurse checking your pulse may miss it.

My average heart rate on the test was 58, lowest was 21 (for 3 seconds), and highest was 250 (for 6 beats). A few minutes after getting in bed, my heart rate regularly is in the 40s and sometimes low 30s.

That sounds exactly like what one should do for, say, couch to 10k: build a solid base in "zone 2" (low aerobic), which also serves not just as a cardio foundation but also builds the body's ability to withstand effort and impact.

Then once the base is built, to make any progress one needs stronger, more focused stimulus, so you introduce interval training at high aerobic (tempo and threshold paces) as well as anaerobic (400-800 "very hard" sustained and all-out sprints) training, combined with a few zone 2 long runs.

And then the cycle repeats: you have to let the body recover so deload, then start a new cycle.

Nicklas Rossner has fantastic resources; there's a video there that explains how to find your current bottleneck: https://m.youtube.com/@NicklasRossnerPT

There's a lot of noise and confusion about what exactly "zone 2" is and why. But definitely longer easier (you're not out of breath) runs build a foundation in more ways than just your cardiovascular system. It's those other components that take a longer time to build. The key is that you are not over-training (watch your sleep and joint pain as an indicator) and can recover and that you are progressively increasing your load by lessay ~10% distance a week. Easy system would be 2 shorter runs and one longer run a week.

There are plenty of online training program generators that are pretty good and will take you from zero to running 10k. I used an online program to run my first 10k somewhere circa 1990.

There a lot of more cutting edge science online (and I follow Nick as well) but if you're not a competitive athlete and are just trying to get in better shape then the answer is mostly just do it. Over some base of running you can throw in some interval training including HIIT.

I was running 10km 3x per week for a few years. When I started swapping some of those runs for HIIT, performance on the remaining 10km runs very noticeably improved in addition to the cardio metrics.

To be clear, performance-maxxing was never the objective. I am in it for the health benefits and conditioning for grueling pursuits. Nonetheless, observable effects of different kinds of training on performance are still interesting to me and helps me optimize the time I spend on it.

Are you able to point out which video explains how to find your current bottleneck? I suspect its something I would find quite useful! Unfortunately most of the videos have quite "clickbaity" titles, which makes it hard to figure out what they are about.

On mobile RN. I'll try to find it once I'm on a desktop.

I had a distinct visual diagram in mind that I can't find again. Maybe my memory is fuzzy and mixed those two:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w2ElWvS2b0c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd_E_OveCPQ

I don't know which video it is either, but what I've found helpful is checking aerobic decoupling. If your heart rate is drifting upward significantly over the course of an hourlong easy run despite not increasing your pace or power, then the bottleneck is probably your aerobic engine. I don't track it daily because it's a noisy metric, but looking at the overall distribution is useful.

After that it's probably determining your LTHR accurately (don't just accept what your Garmin or Apple Watch says it is). This gives a better sense of how hard to push on your hard days, and it's also useful to see what % of HRmax your threshold lands at.

Anyone starting from the couch just needs to start. I started by just pursuing a goal of "run a mile without stopping", then 2, etc.

I've messed with zone 2 a bit and read a fair amount about it. If it gets you out there moving consistently: great. The best workout plan is the one you do. But otherwise I really think it's more of an optimization strategy for people who are trying to seriously increase their miles per week, and are pairing it with higher-intensity runs and/or weight training.

What metrics were you tracking that moved?

Your body gets used to the exercise. You have to constantly change it, otherwise you not gonna get the same thrill.

I found that setting a two minute timer and running up and down a stair case with high intensity once per day can resolve a whole host of seemingly unrelated issues.

Issues such as?

The elevator not working

I'd bet money he's talking about... men's issues

I'm not OP, but when I started run-jog-walking one mile, three days a week (which is a bit more than two minute stairs every day, but still asking muscles, joints, and heart to wake up), that my back pain lessened, some niggling knee tightness stopped bothering me, and I noticed an increase in how long I could go doing something moderately strenuous before craving a rest (e.g. moving boxes, or walking with a heavy object, or running after something or someone). It doesn't have to be a massive lifestyle shift -- walking a couple times a week can give similar benefits. But the jump from "basically sedentary" to "loading muscles and joints and heart for ~20 minutes 2-3x a week" is truly ENORMOUS when it comes to our biological systems, and a lot of those systems start running a lot happier with that.

Exercise is not a panacea, and those who say it will fix everything and cure depression and make you perfect are quacks. But, it pains my contrarian ass to say, some light cardio every now and again is much closer to what our bodies are happy with than desk life, such has been my experience.

This right there. No, you're right, it's not a panacea. However, it absolutely fixed the period back problems I've dealt with most of my adult life. Now if I do something to tweak my lower back, I can't wait to get to a treadmill or out onto the sidewalk. It's the one thing I know will make it feel better.

Of course, that's going to be different for everyone. It'll make some people worse. For me, though (and apparently for you, too), it is the right way to treat those issues.

For those with knees not tolerant of running, I've taken to also rucking around with a heavy backpack. It's fantastic for building torso strength, and "your body weight plus 30 pounds" is still far less impact than "your body weight, but running". Walk up some hills steep enough to make you pant and wonder if you can make it to the top and your body may thank you for it, the way mine thanks me.

BTW, doctors have a saying: "motion is lotion". Also, "when you stop moving, you die". We are not evolved to take root on a sofa. Our bodies are meant to move and jostle and bounce and twist. Absent specific reasons not to, it can make a huge difference in physical comfort.

Same. I found that picking up a 28-kg kettlebell and climbing up a 20-storey building within 6 mins (switching up hands every couple of floors) is an awesome "functional" exercise.

Hits cardio, grip strength and unilateral stability stuff.

If you can haul a 60 pound lump up 20 stories, this article is not for you.

Hard disagree. I am positive I could do this, but I do no cardio. The weightlifting I do has had little effect on my cardio fitness as it relates to doing things that would increase my VO2 max.

I was in this same boat. I just walk about 25k steps a day and lift weights.

Didn't really have a form of cardio i liked. I could never be consistent with running. I settled on this combination with stairclimbing and farmers carries.

If you can't do that it definitely is a sign you don't exercise anywhere close to enough, I know 80+ years old who could still do this

This has strong vibes of "Do this and you will get rid of back pain" followed by the video of some crazy acrobatic stunt.

Congrats, BTW.

I have just tried this, albeit with only 10 stories, and have to say that it's surprisingly hard, foremost for grip giving out and second for perceived heart exertion, despite actual HR not spiking so much.

How many loops you do? Do you run downstairs as well or take elevator? How did you ease into the routine, e.g. did you begin with 10 stories and a couple loops or you did all out at once?

I always run stairs when given an opportunity (big proponent of "incidental exercise"), so when I used to live in apartments I would deliberately rent a room in the highest available floor. It's shocking how much HIIT you can get out of running 20+ flights.

High-intensity exercise is obviously good, but beware of the trap of doing just high intensity exercise and doing it too frequently - the body does not handle that amount of stress particularly well, and it will be counterproductive to your health.

Low intensity exercise that holds your aerobic base is vital as well - and for a well-rounded exercise week, it should constitute the majority of your exercise time.

That is not to say that you should neglect higher intensities, it's just that you cannot do them as often due to the disproportionate amount of fatigue they generate.

Interval training also seems like a great way to burn out and make yourself dread the thought of exercise.

Other than for elite athletes tuning specifically for bursty competitions, interval training is such an unnatural torture that I do not understand the appeal. Even if the dubious popular claim that it is a short cut to optimal fitness might be partly true, I would much rather have an hour or two fun cycling or light running and exploring than 10 minutes of interval agony.

There is a constant stream of pop-science/lifestyle-advice articles advertising HIIT as a way to save time on exercise along the lines of "this smart technique, developed by a Japanese scientist will make you as fit as someone who exercises 8 hours a week with just 4 minutes per day!". Search for "Tabata" if you are curious. So a lot of those, who find regular exercise too hard, try HIIT as a replacement.

I like sprinting a couple times up our hill, ca 10s each, 4-6 times. It’s full out, and when I‘m untrained (like now), I‘m quite exhausted afterwards.

But the dopamine boost I get from this is immense. It lasts 24-48h. I‘m in a general good mood for this period. Sometimes, a little more competitive than normal - that’s a downside.

Normal jogging or long walks don’t have this effect, at all.

A long race will do it just fine. AKA Runner's High.

I also do hill sprints. I try to do one [HIIT] workout a week and also some longer runs.

Hill sprints tend to be safer then sprinting on flat surfaces. Last time I did my HIIT sprinting on level ground my knee didn't really like that at all. A stationary bike (like the "assault bike") is even safer. Or you can just do burpies. People who don't run and haven't sprinted in a long time shouldn't just jump into sprinting.

I have to disagree on both points. Long races don't do this for me - that's also the point of the paper. And I have had more close calls of spraining an ankle when running uphill. The problem with hills also is that you might want to jog down after, but that's super bad for knees.

It's interesting that they characterize a 30-second cycling effort as "all-out" when any cyclist knows it's impossible to go "all-out" for that long. You can go really all-out for a few seconds before your whole metabolic process needs to switch modes. A 30-second effort has to be paced. "All-out" intervals are very effective but for me they mean 4 seconds out of every 30 seconds.

You might need to talk to a doctor if you can only go flat out for 4 seconds before having to slow down. You may put out more power during the first few seconds, but you should be able to go substantially longer than this before falling into the limitations of aerobic capacity.

I assumed this was about uphill cycling, which depending on gradient checks out to me. It's also a function of bike, cargo, and cyclist mass. Lighter cyclists find climbs easier.

You should consult your doctor if your 5-second power isn't a lot more than your 30-second power. Your instant power relies on intramuscular ATP then switches to anaerobic fast glycolysis, which is itself only good for a few tens of seconds at most. After that aerobic dominates. Untrained subjects riding 30s intervals every 5 minutes are necessarily experiencing an aerobic workout and that's why I'm surprised by this definition.

Here's a video of an amateur cyclist going all out for about a minute after spending about five minutes getting up to speed, pushing his bike to 76.11 mph.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JM7I_uPJRYQ

What that rider is demonstrating is maximum lactate clearance after a long aerobic warm-up. This has nothing to do with the pathways by which high intensity intervals are thought to be beneficial.

I don't understand your objection. Anyone who is not very frail could do maximum effort for 30 seconds. It's not going to be constant power/HR/whatever but the person can still go "all-out". Consider a bear chasing you, are you going to say that you will just go all-out for 4 seconds and then pace yourself?

It's an article about cellular chemistry in the journal "Cell". It seems relevant which pathway is being exercised.

Yet they used a training protocol common in sports, and not in cellular biology, probably because they wanted to see effects of training?

Previous discussion less than a month ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49341411

The comments on that post were not nearly as favorable as this one for some reason.

I play Dance Dance Revolution. Doing hard songs in that game is basically the definition of high intensity interval training. And it's fun!

Same! I used to play Max 300 in heavy mode (on repeat) at my local arcade without hugging the bar - your feet end up moving like Donald Duck from Mathemagic Land.

30 minutes and you are gassed...

Nowadays I switched over to Pump It Up - I feel like the 5-step configuration lends itself towards larger body movements and less river dancing. :)

Does anyone have a recommendation for a dumb watch (<$100 USD) that has good programmability (flexible alarms) for a HIIT protocol? It would be nice if it had HRM but at that price point, maybe not feasible.

I don't want the fuss or expense of an Android or Apple watch. Garmin makes some nice models but they are still relatively expensive.

You could just make a playlist of your intervals and use earbuds, or exercising in the town square under a large clock

I would look into a used entry model Garmin. Something like a 235 (I have my old one sitting around). It has an HRM though it's not a terribly reliable one.

2nd hand Garmin or Apple Watch. These things are basically being thrown away and watches like a Gen 6 AW or a Fenix 5 can be found for so little money and they work very well even today if you only care about sports tracking.

I personally cannot stand Apple for sports, which is why I have a AW Ultra 1 AND a Fenix 7 lol. Got both 2nd hand for ~30% of their MSRP.

Personally something like a 2nd hand Garmin Forerunner 55 with a chest based HR monitor is for me the best budget setup. But when shopping second hand you, use what you can find. I often see great deals on things like the Garmin instinct series.

2 years ago I got a Fenix 5 for 180 and it was amazing for me. Just turn off all the "smart" features.

I second this: "2nd hand Garmin Forerunner 55 and with a chest based HR monitor".

For heart rate training in general, the gold standard is an ECG-based chest strap. Avoid an optical-based monitor because you get some lag between readings or it even misses readings (this is especially evident during short intense intervals).

For a chest strap HR monitor, the main one is Polar H10, for a cheaper monitor you can get a Coospo H808S.

Saying that, I mainly use an Apple Watch Ultra 1 because it is convenient, it is good enough and I do not have to hassle with putting on a chest strap - I just have to settle with it taking a few seconds to register the correct heart rate after an intense set.

At first I thought they found something new, however it is known that exercise intensity should be of various types for the best health outcome. In my training regimen I already have a weekly session of high-intensity training, and other session at a lower intensity.

High intensity by far gives you the best gains for the time you put in, but there's only so much you can do without overtraining.

The way to really maximize your potential is to do high intensity 30 mins 3x/wk and then intersperse it with a great deal of low intensity cardio. Like 4x more if you can, per the 80/20 rule.

It works because it's starting to approach the most exercise your body can handle. (Although some athletes definitely fit in more.)

I built this HIIT timer tool www.hiitmeup.fit for exactly this reason as I try to squeeze in a compact exercise during my busy work days. I put this out on show HN a few weeks ago and hope others will find it just as useful as I do.

how come the ones who live the longest never do the HIIT treadmill hamster wheel training, but rather frequent light-to-moderate walks, bicycle rides, garden work or the like?

Can you really do HIIT on a treadmill? It doesn't sound safe to sprint on a machine.

Re your observations. Are you referring to elderly people? I'm not sure this study is about them. My mental model of this mechanism is that relatively young people can choose between e.g. long distance running and sprinting, and that the latter will yield better cardiac outcomes.

In my experience HIIT works very well on a treadmill. Many treadmills even have presets for HIIT.

The kind of HIIT I'm doing is only 10-20s bursts, to stay within ATP-PCr energy metabolism (little lactic acid production). A short sprint followed by 2 minutes rest. That's hard to achieve with a treadmill.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bioenergetic_systems#ATP%E2%80...

Yeah, it doesn't actually work for "real" sprinting. Standard treadmills take too long to get up to speed.

But if you do 30-60s work intervals treadmills work just fine.

I guess it depends on your age and current fitness level. When I was young and fit, I could outrun the treadmill for the periods of time I needed.

The treadmill also wasn't able to change speeds fast enough to really do the good Sprint simulations

Less impact, less wear and tear, more sustainable into old age

The high-intensity gains only show up after you've built the base. Skipping zone 2 to jump straight to intervals is why people plateau and get hurt.

I know the most physically fit I have ever been was when I was able to do every video of the Insanity workout.

Same here in my late 30s. I was a machine. By my late 40s/early 50s it actually started to feel unhealthy, way too cardio intensive, and I switched to a more balanced cardio vs resistance mix. I think Shaun T did the same!

What about adapting the core principle of "Greasing the groove" to cardiovascular workouts?

TL;DR: for some biomarkers, "sprint-interval exercise" (SIE) bursts as short as 5 min can be as effective as much longer periods of "moderate-intensity exercise" (MIE).

Specifically: MIE consisted of 90-min of continuous cycling at 90%–100% of the predetermined first lactate threshold, while SIE consisted of 6 sets of 30-s all-out cycling at a resistance of 0.075 kg·kg−1 body mass, with 4-min rests between the sets (Figure 1A).

The study's sample size was small and the period studied fairly short, but they did measure the levels of several thousand proteins.

"The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That's Smarter, Faster, Shorter"

EDIT: This book is maybe a bit old but covers a lot of ground on high intensity interval training vs. traditional training. I guess this study adds to the body of evidence that HIIT is effective. My take as a random person interested in this stuff is that ideally you are mixing both high intensity and longer duration workouts for their different benefits. But if you are limited in time it seems high intensity is a winner.

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