HIT High Intensity Interval Training

The body gets as much benefit from a short but intensive interval exercise lasting ten minutes than it can from ten hours of moderate training.

High intensity interval training involves running or cycling at almost maximum effort for a minute and then resting for 75 seconds before repeating the process around 10 times.

HIT is "a time-efficient but safe alternative to traditional types of moderate long term exercise," they discovered.

In the experiments, volunteers rode an exercise bike for intervals of just 60 seconds while peddling hard enough to get close to their maximum heart rate.

Tests afterwards showed that their muscles had improved as much as if they had been involved in endurance training.

Reference: A practical model of low-volume high-intensity interval training induces mitochondrial biogenesis in human skeletal muscle: potential mechanisms. March 15, 2010 The Journal of Physiology, 588, 1011-1022.