45%

weekly dose of exercise can be

crammed into the weekend with no
ill effects, says Gary O’Donovan of
Loughborough University, UK. Most
governments urge people to do a little
every day, or at least spread their
exercise over the week. But his team
analysed data from more than 63,000
adults in the UK spanning 18 years and
found that people who opted for a
“weekend warrior” regime had pretty
much the same reduced risk of early
death from all causes, including
cardiovascular disease and cancer, as
those who spread out exercise. “One
weekly bout is usually sufficient to
reduce mortality and morbidity,”
O’Donovan says. Even weekend
warriors who did less than the
recommended amount for the week
fared better than inactive people.
Could you ever get too much of a
good thing? “No level of exercise is too
much,” says O’Donovan. “There’s no
increase in mortality or morbidity if
you keep increasing the amount.” Just
don’t go too hard each time.
Exercising three to five times a
week should set you up for a long
and healthy life, especially if you
mix up activities, says Laura-Anne
Furlong, a biomechanicist at
of people cram all their
weekly exercise into one day
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/
jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2596007
says sports scientist Chris Easton at the
University of the West of Scotland, UK.
“High-intensity training works: it’s
been shown pretty consistently to
make you fitter, make you healthier,”
he says.
That’s because pushing the body
out of its comfort zone for short bursts
forces it to adapt. The higher the
intensity, the greater the adaptation,
with benefits for your lungs, heart and
circulation. “High blood flow through
the heart, through the muscle, is the
thing that causes those large changes
in a short space of time,” says Easton.
That’s not all. In a study published in
2017, Sreekumaran Nair at the Mayo
Clinic in Minnesota and his colleagues
compared muscle samples from
younger and older people who had
regularly done either HIIT training,
a weights workout or both for three

Can you avoid

Loughborough University. “But
running 10 to 15 miles, seven days a
week, on a road will probably lead to
injuries.” Chris Simms
months. They found that HIIT reduced,
and even sometimes reversed, the
effects of old age on mitochondria,
the energy powerhouses inside cells.
‘hitting the wall’?
With age, mitochondrial deterioration “Bonking” takes on a very different meaning
causes fatigue and can contribute to when you start running. It doesn’t matter
diabetes. What’s more, high-intensity whether you are a seasoned runner or

Is intense exercise
training helps boost your metabolic a newbie, when faced with your first
rate, which means you burn more marathon, it is impossible to ignore talk

better? energy even at rest.

Getting fit in 4 minutes: this is the
promise of high-intensity interval
training, marketed in gyms as HIIT. The
idea was thought up by Izumi Tabata
and a team of researchers from the
National Institute of Fitness and Sports
in Japan in the 1990s. Tabata showed
that 4-minute workouts, comprising
repeated cycles of 20 seconds of all-out
work followed by 10 seconds of rest,
done four days a week, brought greater
aerobic improvements than an hour’s
normal workout done five days a
week for six weeks.
But does it deliver the goods? “The
answer to that is absolutely, definitely,”
Sounds great, but full-on HIIT
isn’t for everyone, Easton warns:
done properly, it is an unpleasant
experience. “I do this with my
students and invariably after all-out
30 seconds of maximal work on a
bike, half of them are physically sick
afterwards.” But incorporating some
element of vigorous exercise in a
longer routine – whether faster-paced
walking or jogging, some hills or
just a few stairs – will deliver benefits.
“In terms of disease risk, what is
protective is substantially improved
when there’s a higher intensity
component,” says Easton. James Witts
and Catherine de Lange
of bonking or “hitting the wall”.
It will leave you weak at the knees, but
not in a good way. Those who have been
through it describe the experience as a
sudden onset of debilitating fatigue and
loss of energy that happens during the
race’s latter half. Formerly speedy runners
slow to a shuffle, often capitulating to the
need to walk, and a racer swiftly switches
from a desire to finish in a certain time to a
yearning to just finish at all.
Bonking is a surprisingly slippery
subject. From a physiological standpoint,
we know we hit the wall when we run out
of glycogen, a carbohydrate stored in our
muscles and liver that provides a readily
available source of energy. At this point,

28 | NewScientist | 13 January 2018


the body switches to its fat stores. Fat
is a great fuel source because we have
loads of it, but we are much less efficient
at turning it into energy than carbs. This
means runners can’t maintain the intensity
they were moving at, and have to drop
to a walk.
So far so simple, but athletes and
researchers alike have been left scratching
their heads as to why people only hit the
wall some of the time – and how to avoid it.
One study looking at more than 300
marathoners found that only 43 per cent
reported hitting the wall during this
42-kilometre challenge. Men were much
more likely to do so, while runners who
boasted a longer maximum training run
were less likely to bonk than those who had
never gone further than 32 kilometres.
Pacing yourself could be key to avoiding
the phenomenon, as this might ease
the transition from carbohydrates to fat
stores and ensure you don’t run out of
glycogen too abruptly. So it could be that
women are more disciplined about training
and pacing themselves during a run.
Psychology plays a role too. “There’s also
a self-fulfilling prophecy component,” says
Jens Omli at California Polytechnic State
University. If you expect to hit the wall, you
are more likely to do so.
OUTWARD FOCUS
There are ways to hone your thinking, says
Clare Stevinson at Loughbourgh University
in the UK. Her work shows that runners who
daydream during a race are more likely to
bonk, but also that those who spend too
much time thinking about breathing hit
the wall sooner. She suggests focusing on
something external like the scenery and
spectators, and paying attention to race
conditions, distance markers and drink
stations. Intermittent check-ins about
how you are feeling are wise, “but more
attention should be focused externally on
the task at hand,” she says.
So the best way to avoid the wall is to do
some long-distance training, pace yourself
and develop a mental strategy. “Carb
loading” before a race can increase the
amount of glycogen we start off with,
but eventually our stores run dry.
Aylin Woodward
Does stretching
help?
Stretching adds precious minutes to
your workout, but is it all it’s cut out to
be? Accepted wisdom has it that a good
stretch helps avoid injury and leaves
you less sore after a tough workout.
But a 2011 review of 12 studies found
that regardless of whether you do it
before or after exercise, stretching
doesn’t significantly reduce delayed-
onset muscle soreness (see “Why are
my muscles aching?”, page 33).
It also doesn’t seem to reduce the risk
of injuring your back or lower limbs.
But it does seem to fractionally reduce
the risk of some injuries to muscles,
ligaments and tendons. This is especially
true of dynamic stretching, where you
move your limbs to increase the range
of motion, says Nic Gill at the University
of Waikato, who is also the head
strength and conditioning coach for
New Zealand’s All Blacks rugby team.
“The point of stretching should be
to get good mobility and normal
function,” he says.
What about performance? In work
now under review, Gill and his team
looked at how stretching affected
20 athletes sprinting, jumping and
changing direction. Although the
participants felt the stretching would
help, it made no difference.
And aside from that fact it wastes
time, there might be other good
reasons to skip the stretch. “It may,
in fact, reduce exercise performance
for some types of activities such as
endurance running,” says Lynda
Norton of Flinders University in
Adelaide, Australia, who has conducted
a review of studies looking at the
impact of stretching. The static variant
where you try and hold or increase a
stretch, seems especially bad. “Static
stretching has been shown to inhibit
maximum strength and power, which
are important for explosive activities
like jumping and sprinting,” she says.
That’s because these movements rely
on elastic energy generated by the
muscles. Stretching seems to reduce
their ability to store and reuse this
form of energy, says Norton, stopping
people from sprinting as fast or
jumping as high. >
13 January 2018 | NewScientist | 29