Items related to Fast Exercise: The Simple Secret of High-Intensity...

Fast Exercise: The Simple Secret of High-Intensity Training - Hardcover

 
9781476759975: Fast Exercise: The Simple Secret of High-Intensity Training
View all copies of this ISBN edition:
 
 
FastExercise: The Simple Secret of High-Intensity Training

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author:
Dr. Michael Mosley is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The FastDiet, FastExercise, FastLife, and The 8-Week Blood Sugar Diet, and The Clever Gut Diet.  Dr. Mosley trained to be a doctor at the Royal Free Hospital in London before joining the BBC, where he spent three decades as a science journalist and executive producer. Now freelance, he is a well-known television personality and has won numerous television awards, including an RTS (Royal Television Award), and was named Medical Journalist of the Year by the British Medical Association.

Peta Bee is an award-winning journalist and qualified running coach with degrees in sports science and nutrition.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
FastExercise Foreword


OVER THE LAST COUPLE OF years I’ve noted a remarkable transformation in Dr. Michael Mosley. Gone is the middle-aged spread I saw when we first met and in its place are superefficient muscles, doing a good job of rapidly clearing away the high levels of sugar and fat that used to hang around in his arteries after each meal. I flatter myself that at least part of this transformation stems from our work together, in 2011, on a documentary—for which we put Michael through his paces in our lab and introduced him to high-intensity training (or HIT for short).

Michael was at that time searching for solutions to combat his family history of Type 2 diabetes—solutions which he knew would include exercise, but ideally in a form that was as brief and effective as possible. The reason we met was because my team in Edinburgh had recently completed a study demonstrating that just a few minutes of high-intensity cycling a week could dramatically improve your diabetes risk factors.

This sounds, on the surface, like an absurd claim. We “know” that to get the benefits of exercise, like aerobic and metabolic fitness, you have to put in the hours. But is that really true?

When I was twelve years old I ran my first half marathon in Renfrew, Scotland. Over the following ten years I must have run over 20,000 miles, and also completed many hours of gym training. I did so because this is what science told us was required to improve aerobic performance.

Even before starting at Glasgow University (to become a dentist, of all things), I was an avid reader of exercise science books. During my intercalated degree studies, which focused on exercise physiology, I began to realize that much of the classic exercise science—carried out only by athletes or small numbers of superhealthy Scandinavians—was not a reliable guide to how exercise modifies health and physiology in the general public.

My first introduction to HIT was not, however, in a lecture theater but on the track. Early in the track season my coach, John Toner, had me doing sets of 3 x 200 meters with three minutes of recovery and not much more. This was not normal training for a distance runner, but it at least had the virtue of being quick. I was intrigued.

During my last year at Glasgow, I decided to carry out a training intervention study as my honors project. Working with the youth team at our athletics club, we put them through ten weeks of high-intensity interval training and found improvements in performance and efficiency way beyond what was achieved through regular endurance training. Just after graduating, I presented my findings at my first scientific conference, organized by McMaster University, fittingly enough where modern “cycle-based” HIT was born.

Since then I have spent twenty years working on human physiology, exercise, and genomics, trying to explain the links between exercise and health. For the past ten years, at our university laboratories in the United Kingdom, in Scandinavia, and with colleagues in Canada, we have put hundreds of volunteers through different forms of HIT. Medical tests have shown that just a few minutes of HIT, done three times a week, can deliver improvements in line with the benefits you’d get from doing many hours of conventional exercise.

Importantly, these findings have come out of independent studies done in several countries—notably by professors Martin Gibala at McMaster University in Canada, Niels Vollaard at the University of Bath, and Ulrik Wisloff in Norway.

One of the reasons we do this research is because we are interested in time. Or rather the lack of it. We all know there are good reasons for doing exercise. As well as improving fitness, there are long-term health benefits in reducing risk factors associated with cancer, diabetes, and cardiovascular disease.

But we also know that following conventional exercise recommendations involves time and effort. Critically, lack of time is the most common reason people give for not doing any organized physical activity.

I believe that we have now produced sufficient data to be able to recommend short bursts of high-intensity exercise as a safe and effective alternative to conventional workouts, removing the “time barrier” as an excuse for not exercising. This will hopefully boost compliance and help people to take up an approach that will lead to a healthier way of life. The great thing about HIT is that it can be done in the workplace or at home without preplanning or missing an episode of your favorite TV show.

I also believe that when it comes to advances in exercise science, we have only begun to scratch the surface, that our increased understanding of genomics and metabolomics will soon help us tailor or personalize lifestyle advice.

Once upon a time we assumed that everyone got roughly the same benefit from exercise and that if people didn’t it was because they were slacking. Today we know that the way each person responds to exercise is unique and we can use genomic testing to help personalize goal setting.

By early 2013 nearly a million people in the United States had already signed up for full genome-scans with the hope of understanding their health better and avoiding the risk factors most relevant to their genes. Tailored advice is better advice and better advice should reduce chronic disease, ultimately reducing pressure on our public health services. By combining simple solutions like HIT with hi-tech solutions like DNA profiling we hope to pinpoint the optimal exercise protocol to help control the risk factors most relevant to each individual and not some abstract population “average.”

Doing the science is critical. But without translation of this “science” into a useful and practical guide, one that can be used by anyone, our science fails to make an impact.

I recommend FastExercise because it is an up-to-date account of the latest studies but one which also demystifies some quite complex science, opening eyes to how easily an exercise regime can fit into a daily routine.

Following Michael and Peta’s advice, and our science, should help you reduce your risk of various chronic diseases and, who knows, you may even find yourself enjoying a workout for the first time!

Professor Jamie Timmons

December 2013|FastExercise Introduction


AS A MEDICALLY TRAINED JOURNALIST I frequently come across claims that seem too good to be true and often are. Occasionally, after digging around, I reconsider my original position, acknowledge that what might appear at first to be outrageous could have something in it. As the economist John Maynard Keynes once said, “When the facts change, I change my mind.”

This happened to me when, in early 2012, I first heard about intermittent fasting. My initial reaction was skepticism. I assumed it would turn out to be some variation on “detoxing” or other largely discredited views of how the body works. Nonetheless I decided to find out more as I’d recently discovered that I was a borderline diabetic with too much visceral fat (the fat that lies inside your abdomen). My father had died from a diabetes-related illness and I could see myself going down the same road.

So I set out to examine the claim that you can lose weight and get health benefits, particularly improvements in your insulin, by changing your pattern of eating. I soon came across research done in the United States and the United Kingdom which pointed to rapid fat loss and other benefits that would come from cutting my calories, not every day, but just a few days a week.

As I looked deeper I discovered intermittent fasting was backed by a significant body of animal and human research. I spoke to many eminent experts, tested the claims on myself, and made a documentary for the BBC. Then, in January 2013, I wrote a book with Mimi Spencer, The FastDiet, which summarized all this research into what we called a 5:2 diet (eat normally five days a week, cut your calories for two). Using this method, I lost over 20 pounds of fat and my blood glucose returned to a normal level. Although this was just my experience (and personal anecdotes make poor science) it was in line with a number of clinical studies done on different forms of intermittent fasting.

We still don’t know the ideal pattern for intermittent fasting, the true long-term benefits or the potential pitfalls, but since the book was published many thousands of people have followed the 5:2 regime, lost weight, and contacted me to say how easy it is. And I’m pleased to say new studies are underway.

While writing The FastDiet, one of the areas I touched on—but only briefly—was exercise. Diet and exercise are complementary, they go together like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, like Batman and Robin. And, as we will see, there are interesting parallels in the way science is transforming the way we think about both.

Before making the film on fasting, I had come across a rapidly developing new area of exercise research called high-intensity interval training (HIIT), also known as HIT (high-intensity training).

One of the pioneers of this radically different approach to exercise is Jamie Timmons, Professor of Systems Biology at Loughborough University. Loughborough is home to the Centre for Olympic Studies and Research and has one of the leading sports research departments in the United Kingdom.

When we met, Jamie made what I thought was an outrageous, almost unbelievable claim. He said that I could get many of the more important benefits of exercise from just three minutes of intense exercise a week. He said that if I was prepared to give it a go he was confident that in just four weeks I would see significant changes in my biochemistry. It seemed wildly unlikely but also immensely intriguing. So I got myself properly tested and then I went for it. The results, which I discuss on this page, were a revelation.

Since I had an initial conversation with Jamie back in 2011, research on HIT has exploded, with new findings coming out all the time. Even in the eighteen months that I have been working on this book there has been a wealth of new studies providing mounting evidence that you really can get many of the same benefits, from short bursts of intense effort as you can from following the more traditional approach, or perhaps even more. Benefits which include:

· Improved aerobic fitness and endurance

· Reduced body fat

· Increased upper and lower body strength

· Improved insulin sensitivity

These research findings form the basis of what I’ve called FastExercise, a practical and enjoyable way to get the maximal benefits in the minimal time.

My coauthor, leading sports journalist and coach Peta Bee, has spent her career investigating the claims of the sport and fitness industry. Unlike me she loves exercise. She’s provided invaluable experience which has helped turn theory into practice.

The Dynamo and the Slob



MICHAEL’S MOTIVATION

Peta and I approach exercise from very different perspectives. She is fantastically sporty and has been from an early age. She runs marathons for fun and adores a good, hard workout. She has spent the last twenty years thinking, writing, and training others to share her passion.

I, on the other hand, don’t like exercise. I don’t get a high from working out or pushing myself; instead I share the views of astronaut Neil Armstrong who once said, “I believe that every human has a finite amount of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises.” Or the actor Peter O’Toole who claimed, “The only exercise I take is walking behind the coffins of friends who took exercise.”

All right, that is an exaggeration. Now aged 56, I see the need and I appreciate the value of being active. I also fully embrace the idea that we are born to move. When I was at medical school I played quite a lot of sport, went for runs, and swam. Then I started working and could no longer find the time.

Don’t get me wrong; I am not a complete slob. I love skiing, enjoy walks, relish swimming in the sea, and like being active. I don’t actually think of any of these as “exercise,” something you do because you think you should.

Exercise for me means the gym. It means going for long runs even when it is wet and cold, or trudging away on the treadmill; it is hours getting sweaty on an exercise bike or lifting heavy weights, followed by those incredulous moments when you step on the weighing scales and discover that you have hardly shifted a pound. For me, exercise is there to be endured, done because you have to, not because you want to.

If I am going to exercise I want it to be short, sharp, easy to do, and soon over. This, along with the science, is what first attracted me to HIT. Peta, as you might expect, came to HIT for different reasons.

PETA’S MOTIVATION

Unlike Michael, I love exercise and the way it makes me feel. I enjoy testing my own endurance and strength and relish the fatigue that comes with being absolutely physically spent.

My love affair with exercise started when I took up athletics at primary school—a start which eventually saw me run for Wales in my teens and early twenties. My passion for understanding how the body responds to intense effort, how it is repeatedly able to push itself to new limits, led me to study sports science at university. It was during that time that I gained a grounding in the basic principles of physiology and biomechanics and this cemented my view of fitness and how to attain it. Fitness eventually became the prime focus of my career as a journalist, and for the past twenty years I have written about sports science and fitness and their impact on health and longevity.

As for HIT, in all my many years of exercising and studying the practice of exercise, I have found nothing that comes close to producing the physical and mental rewards of it. I suppose in some ways I am the living embodiment of a lifelong FastExerciser—not that I realized it until recently. My induction into the concept of intense bursts of effort with short bouts of recovery occurred when I first started athletics training. Several times a week I would sprint-jog, sprint-jog my way around the track—a practice I have kept up with varying degrees of effort to this day as I race up hills, around alternate edges of a football pitch, between lampposts, and along lines of trees.

Now, at 45, a busy, working mom, I no longer have the time or, to be honest, the inclination to spend more than an hour a day working out. Yes, I want to offset middle-age weight gain, to feel good and, of course, look as good as I can. And I want a body that performs well. But I want it fast. And that, in short, is the greatest appeal of HIT for me. If you want to discover a way to get fit quickly, with minimal time commitment, read on.

The role of science is to question. It is by doing experiments that traditional thinking is challenged and sometimes overthrown. So, where does that leave widely held exercise beliefs? Claims such as:

· To get maximum benefit you should do lots of moderate-intensity exercise

· If you exercise you will lose weight

· You should always do lengthy warm-ups before exercising

· Stretching before exercise will improve your performance and reduce your risk of injury

· We all get benefit from doing exercise

In this book we take a good, hard look at these and other claims. In...

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

  • PublisherAtria Books
  • Publication date2014
  • ISBN 10 1476759979
  • ISBN 13 9781476759975
  • BindingHardcover
  • Edition number1
  • Number of pages208
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9781476759982: FastExercise: The Simple Secret of High-Intensity Training

Featured Edition

ISBN 10:  1476759987 ISBN 13:  9781476759982
Publisher: Atria Books, 2014
Softcover

Top Search Results from the AbeBooks Marketplace

Stock Image

Mosley, Dr Michael
Published by Atria Books (2014)
ISBN 10: 1476759979 ISBN 13: 9781476759975
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GF Books, Inc.
(Hawthorne, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. Book is in NEW condition. Seller Inventory # 1476759979-2-1

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 24.46
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Mosley, Dr Michael
Published by Atria Books (2014)
ISBN 10: 1476759979 ISBN 13: 9781476759975
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Book Deals
(Tucson, AZ, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: New. New! This book is in the same immaculate condition as when it was published. Seller Inventory # 353-1476759979-new

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 24.47
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Mosley, Dr Michael
Published by Atria Books (2014)
ISBN 10: 1476759979 ISBN 13: 9781476759975
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenWavesOfBooks
(Fayetteville, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_1476759979

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 21.28
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.00
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Mosley, Dr Michael
Published by Atria Books (2014)
ISBN 10: 1476759979 ISBN 13: 9781476759975
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldBooks
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New Copy. Customer Service Guaranteed. Seller Inventory # think1476759979

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 27.18
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Mosley, Dr Michael
Published by Atria Books (2014)
ISBN 10: 1476759979 ISBN 13: 9781476759975
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Front Cover Books
(Denver, CO, U.S.A.)

Book Description Condition: new. Seller Inventory # FrontCover1476759979

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 29.52
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 4.30
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Mosley, Dr Michael
Published by Atria Books (2014)
ISBN 10: 1476759979 ISBN 13: 9781476759975
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
GoldenDragon
(Houston, TX, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Buy for Great customer experience. Seller Inventory # GoldenDragon1476759979

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 53.79
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.25
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Mosley, Dr Michael
Published by Atria Books (2014)
ISBN 10: 1476759979 ISBN 13: 9781476759975
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
Wizard Books
(Long Beach, CA, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Seller Inventory # Wizard1476759979

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 54.34
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: US$ 3.50
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds
Stock Image

Mosley, Dr Michael
Published by Atria Books (2014)
ISBN 10: 1476759979 ISBN 13: 9781476759975
New Hardcover Quantity: 1
Seller:
The Book Spot
(Sioux Falls, SD, U.S.A.)

Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks450926

More information about this seller | Contact seller

Buy New
US$ 59.00
Convert currency

Add to Basket

Shipping: FREE
Within U.S.A.
Destination, rates & speeds