As spring semester began earlier this week, students gradually started lacking one invariable feature: time. As studies take over, other activities naturally get deprioritized and a two hour workout session each day may not be most logical choice. But a new study shows that students and other people in despair of time might have gotten lucky.

Dr. Michael Mosley is a British television producer who studied medicine in London at a young age and moved to TV broadcasting in the early 1990s. His televised documentaries have won an EMMY and he was named the “medical journalist of the year” by the British Medical Association for an innovative program about the discovery of Helicobacter pylori, a bacteria that in severe cases can lead to stomach cancer.

“A couple of years ago, I began looking into a radically different approach to exercise called High Intensity Training (HIT). The idea is that instead of trying to shed weight and get healthier by jogging for hours, you can get many of the more important benefits of exercise from as little as three minutes of HIT a week,” Mosley said in an interview with the Daily Mail.

The ideologies of High Intensity Training have been around for a while. 70 years ago, a strong-minded medical student named Roger Bannister decided he wanted to run a mile under four minutes. With the lack of time his medical studies provided, Bannister decided to do interval sprints.

“The sprints consisted of running flat out for one minute, then jogging for two or three minutes before doing another one-minute sprint. He would repeat this cycle ten times, then head back to work. The whole thing normally took less than 35 minutes. He became the first person in the world to break the four-minute mile. Since then almost every middle-distance runner has done interval sprints as part of their training,” Mosley said.

Although Bannister was well before his time, science is slowly catching up. A research group from the Laval University in Quebec, Canada compared two sets of fitness teams, one doing HIT and the other doing steady-state cardio. When the results came back, it was proved that the group who had followed the steady-state cardio routine had burned over 15,000 more calories than their HIT counterparts. What was interesting, though, was the fact that the HIT group had lost significantly more body fat.

“Part of the explanation is that HIT makes your muscles produce new and more efficient mitochondria, the tiny power plants in your cells that convert glucose into useable energy. The more mitochondria you have, the more power they produce and the more fat and sugar they consume,” Mosley explained.

It is good to know that HIT is not for everyone. According to sparkpeople.com, it is wise to stay away from HIT if you have any cardiovascular problems or other health concerns. The demanding workout requires a strong aerobic ability and could eventually do harm if there are underlying heart conditions. While Mosley recognizes physi cal activity can be dangerous, he hopes that the tough exercise will not scare people away as the efficiency of HIT outscores any other form of exercise.

“The idea is that instead of trying to shed weight and get healthier by jogging for hours, you can get many of the more important benefits of exercise from as little as three minutes of HIT a week.”—Michael Mosley

“If you are frail or extremely unfit it would be wise to have a medical check-up before starting any form of exercise, but don’t use that as an excuse not to start. You can get a dose of HIT while walking or even from climbing the stairs. The benefits greatly outweigh the risks,” Mosley said.

A HIT cardio circuit class is hosted by the Gustavus Health Majors Club on Wednesdays at 4:30 p.m. in the Lund Center Aerobics Room.

-Philip Evans