Prime Fitness for Women

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Quick—what’s the No. 1 reason you either don’t exercise or don’t log as many workouts as you’d like?

Most women I know will say “not enough time!”

I say it too. We’re all overscheduled, with so many more commitments than our calendars can hold.

But here’s yet another study (among many) suggesting that brief, intense exercise provides fabulous benefits.

OK, so maybe you’re not getting the 30 minutes, five days a week that major health organizations recommend. Can you squeeze in 75 minutes a week, warm-ups and cool-downs included? 

What you can accomplish in less than 2 hours a week

One of the advantages of exercise is the positive effect it has on blood-sugar levels.

Your muscles’ preferred fuel is glucose (blood sugar), so any form of muscular movement consumes glucose and thus reduces its level in your blood. When you exercise, your body is also able to use insulin more effectively, and that too results in greater “consumption” of blood glucose.

As you can imagine, this is great for diabetics. But it has positive implications for others too.

A study published in the December 2011 Journal of Applied Physiology looked at eight people with diabetes who used an exercise bike to perform 10 one-minute bouts of work at 90 percent of their maximal heart rate, with each bout followed by a minute of rest. That’s working very, very hard, and you can bet they were under medical supervision during these sessions.

They weren’t spring chickens either, with an average age of 63. Their average body mass index was 32, which is obese.

Just two weeks of this regime, three times weekly, resulted in [click to keep reading…]

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