The results are seen quickly, too.  Apparently doing a few intense muscle exercises, each lasting only about 30 seconds, dramatically improves your metabolism in just two weeks.

This is great news for people who feel they don’t have time to work out according to current guidelines, which underscore the importance of performing moderate to vigorous physical activity for at least 30 minutes 5 times a week.  Those guidelines still offer the best overall health and fitness results, including cardiovascular and muscle training sufficient to ward off all kinds of ailments from heart disease to stress to diabetes. However, if maintaining that level of exercise is impossible, scientists now know that insulin and glucose metabolism is positively affected by even small amounts of regular, intense exercise. In other words, something is much better than nothing, but remember to make it intense. Dr. Timmons says, “The low volume, high intensity training used in our study substantially improved both insulin action and glucose clearance in otherwise sedentary young males. This reveals that we do not yet fully appreciate the traditional connection between exercise and diabetes”.

The subjects in the study used bikes to perform quick sprints of high intensity and short duration. Doing this kind of activity a few times a week should have the protective action reported in this research. You can also combine low-volume high intensity training with your regular workouts. If you work out 5 days a week, you could replace one or two days with sprint exercises, substantially improving your body’s ability to process insulin and sugars – and increasing your cardiovascular strength, too. But even if you can’t (or don’t) make the time to exercise that many times each week, perhaps you can fit in just a few 3-minute sprint sessions each week to reap the health benefits revealed by this research.