The NYT came out with an article last week, “How Little Exercise Can You Get Away With?” In it, they mentioned “new research” and discoveries that we have been doing at X Gym since 1998. It’s nice to see mainstream catching up, even if it is more than a quarter-century behind X Gym.
Here are some of their “new” discoveries and announcements in the article:
1. A
growing body of research suggests that the amount of exercise you need to start seeing real health and fitness benefits is surprisingly small and eminently achievable.
Yes, this is what we have been saying for decades, and is what we call “Xercise snaX.” These 2-3 minute Xercises are found on our Xercise App.
2. A
2022 meta-analysis found that adults who spent just a few minutes a day doing resistance training could reduce the risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality, and cancer mortality compared with those who did none.
A medical analysis is a study of multiple research papers on the same subject and is generally recognized as proof of concept, rather than just one or two papers that show similar findings. We have found these disease reductions to be true with X Gym members over the years.
3. In a
2021 study, Dr. Steele and his colleagues analyzed about 15,000 Dutch gym members (most of whom were new to strength training) who enrolled in a program of one 20-minute workout per week, consisting of five to six repetitions of six exercises. In the first year, they got about 30 percent stronger.
We have been doing 4-7 reps of 6-7 Xercises on all our programs since 1998. Our results are much better than 30% stronger, though. This could be because we are doing two sessions a week instead of one, and/or due to our unique methodology (likely both).
4. Research
suggests that so long as you are pushing to the point of fatigue (you should feel
like you can’t do more than another repetition or two), as little as one hard set per muscle group per week seems to be enough to get meaningful strength gains, Dr. Androulakis-Korakakis said, adding that this is true for beginners as well as trained strength athletes.
Our Complete Muscle Fatigue (CMF) principle is closely described here, however, we go further – to complete failure – not just the point of fatigue they describe.
5. Believe it or not, how you get there isn’t all that important. If your sets are challenging, you can get similar results from
a few heavy reps or a lot of light ones, said Zac Robinson, a postdoctoral researcher at Florida Atlantic University. Free weights,
machines,
exercise bands and body weight exercises all work.
Weight machines are great if you want to bulk up like a bodybuilder, but the reason we got rid of ours in 2015, was because we were evolving faster than the other gyms and realized that getting rid of machines with axles and guide rods that help with movement patterns, and replacing them with free motion, resistance devices gave a functional fitness that tones defines, versus a non-functional fitness that produces bulky, non-coordinated muscles.
6. Minimum effective dose training isn’t just for beginners; experienced athletes can also benefit. Dr. Androulakis-Korakakis has
compared various minimum effective dose approaches in competitive powerlifters, for example, and found that a few heavy sets of one to five reps per week, per exercise, could be enough to meaningfully increase strength. The subjects also reported feeling less sore after doing the shorter workouts.
Again, muscle failure is the key here. And when you do functional exercises using Time Under Tension (TUT) like we do at X Gym, you get drastically less muscle soreness versus traditional training that uses heavy weights and ballistic reps. 7. Emerging evidence suggests you can get similar benefits in even less time, said Duck-chul Lee, the director of the Physical Activity Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh. He and his colleagues have found that even five- to 10-minute bursts of an exercise with an intensity like running, and as little as 30 minutes total per week, significantly reduced the risk of all-cause mortality as well as deaths by heart attack or stroke. “Emerging evidence” – Ha! One such paper, published in 2016, found that previously sedentary men who did three hard 10-minute workouts, per week improved their insulin resistance and other health markers just as much after three months as a group who did three moderate 45-minute workouts per week.
Yes, we seen these results with our members since 1998.
8. A 2020 German study looked at obese participants in sedentary jobs who started a workout of five one-minute bursts of hard effort (80 to 95 percent of their maximum heart rate). Participants shrank their waist circumference, lowered their blood pressure and also improved their cardiovascular fitness in three months while a control group stayed the same.
Yes, we call these Xercise snaX (mentioned above).
9. If you’re new to exercise or aren’t interested in the gym, you can also boost your fitness by increasing the intensity of activities that are already part of your daily life. Experts call this VILPA: vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. For instance, you might walk a bit faster to run an errand, or climb a flight of stairs fast enough to get your heart rate up, said Thijs M. H. Eijsvogels, an exercise researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands.
We call this NEAT, and have written on it often (just type NEAT in the search bar at the bottom of our home page). It is the energy you burn outside the gym, with normal daily activities, and it has a big impact on your overall metabolic rate.
P.S. This NYT article is so similar to what we have been doing since 1998 that it’s hard not to suspect the author visited our website and thought we had such a good methodology that they should go find research to back it up and then write about it as their “discovery.” It’s nice to see mainstream reporting facts and science only a quarter century behind the X Gym, though, because they’re usually much further behind than that. 😉
