4×4 interval training – 6 common sources of confusion

As you may have guessed from our video posted before the weekend, CERG is quite the proponent of 4×4 (“four by four”) aerobic interval training. We’ve compared it to other types of exercise, and found it to be very effective compared to continuous moderate exercise in multiple studies. The video provides a very good introduction, but we’d like to address six common sources of confusion:

1. It’s too exhausting
If you’re not using a heart rate monitor, the rule of thumb is that during the intense parts of interval training, you should be unable to maintain a conversation comfortably. But what does this actually mean? That you should exhaust yourself completely? No. A common pitfall is pushing too hard during the high-intensity intervals, so the four minutes exhaust you. The intensity should get your heart rate up, but you should feel capable of continuing another minute after your four are up, and doing another interval after you’ve completed 4×4. Trial and error may be good enough to figure it out, but using a heart rate monitor can help you from tiring yourself out. Ideally, you should feel roughly the same after every interval – something that may be especially important for the sake of motivation.

2. It’s not intense enough
Conversely, perhaps you’re confused after hardly being out of breath and lacking lactic acid buildup from completing your intervals at 90% of maximum heart rate, per the measurements from your heart rate monitor. Isn’t this interval stuff supposed to be high-intensity training? In fact, unless you’re incredibly fit, an issue like this probably stems from “90%” not actually being 90% of your maximum heart rate. While there are formulas for calculating your max, the variation between people can be so great that you’re better off actually testing your maximum heart rate rather than just calculating it. Which brings us to…

Exercising for the sake of your health

Came across a pretty funny comic today:

There’s probably some truth in it. Most people would find it far more comfortable and convenient just to take a pill, rather than having to exercise regularly to stay healthy.

The thing with exercise is that to a great extent, it all hinges on motivation, and motivation is tricky (see this morning’s quite related post for Norwegian speakers – in a nutshell the point was that every Monday marks a new week, and it’s never too late to start exercising).

Perhaps it’s time to start compiling a list of things that motivate you to exercise, health benefits being an obvious one. What are yours? Share in the comments!

Mandag morgens treningsblues? Tvert imot!

Siri Marte Hollekim, en av doktorgradstipendiatene våre blogger også. Hun er utdannet fysioterapeut, og har erfaring som fysisk trener og fysioterapeut for RBK, og kan sies å være mer enn alminnelig opptatt av trening og ernæring. Idag har hun noen flotte tips for hvordan man kan bruke mandagen til å komme igang med trening og kostholdsendringer:

“Hvis du ikke fikk til å begynne med ønskede aktivitets-og/eller kostendringer forrige uke:

• Kartlegg om du fortsatt ønsker dette og hva du vil gjøre
• Sett en startdato og et tidspunkt
• Forplikt deg gjerne til noe, eller overfor noen

Hvis du vet hva du vil, men alltid utsetter til i morgen:

• Forplikt deg overfor noen denne uka, begynn idag.
• Sett av faste tidspunkt for trening denne uka/planlegg måltider og innhold
• Sett ambisjonsnivået slik at det er rom for progresjon neste uke, heller enn omvent!”

Varige endringer
Siri er inne på noe veldig viktig. Trening er mye lettere hvis det kobles til følelsen av mestring enn om det blir noe ulystbetont som man piner seg gjennom. Kanskje går det litt tregere fremover hvis man starter forsiktig istedenfor å kaste seg ut i et intensivt treningsprogram, men samtidig er det alfa og omega å holde motivasjonen oppe. Det kan være fristende å skylde på media eller den moderne livsstilen for at folk har forventninger om umiddelbare lettvinte resultater, men realiteten er at det å spise sunt og trene regelmessig ikke kan gjøres på et par uker for så å være overstått. Vi snakker livsstilsendringer. Derfor må ambisjonsnivået være realistisk.

For noen er kanskje dørstokkmila verst. Da gjelder det å unngå motivasjonsdiskursjonen med seg selv før hver eneste treningsøkt. Vi lever alle travle liv, og det er alt for lett å finne unnskyldninger til hvorfor man burde slippe unna akkurat idag. Du tar det jo igjen en annen dag, ikke sant? Men så skjer det ikke likevel, for andre dager har sine unnskyldninger de og. Kanskje øker skyldfølelsen over alle de avlyste treningsøktene og fremskrittene som uteblir, før det tilslutt er lettere bare å gi det hele opp. Uten motivasjon blir det meste for tungt i lengden.

Løft hverandre
Så tren med en venn, sett deg realistiske mål og sørg for at du holder treningen så lystbetont som mulig. Gjør trening til en fast post på kalenderen. For noen kan det hjelpe å kjøpe pulsklokke eller skritteller så du kan “logge” prestasjonene dine og se tallene forbedre seg. Kanskje kan du skrive treningsdagbok, hvor du tillater deg selv å være ordentlig stolt av fremskrittene dine. Ikke minst, trøst deg med at du er langt ifra å være den eneste som kan slite med å komme igang, så spør venner om motivasjonsråd og løft hverandre. Selv om mandag morgen kan være litt tung, kan det også holde potensialet for en god ny uke. God trening!

Skrevet av Hanna Sofie Ellingsen ved CERG.

NYT: A set point for exercise?

Imagine if we all had a set point for exercise. It would be the perfect excuse for brushing aside your new exercise regimen and just staying on the couch. Your body would be compensating for exercise by being extra lazy for the rest of the day anyways, so what would be the point? A recent NYT article plays with this so-called “activitystat” theory, and brings up some pretty interesting newly published research, both supporting and disproving the notion.

Exercise useless to combat obesity?
You can see the NYT’s summary for the full run-down, but the conclusion is really important. The take-home message isn’t meant to be that exercise is useless. It’s absolutely not. Just refer to our research and the benefits should become quite apparent…

Rather, losing weight can be more complex than adding a light run into your daily routine, and the NYT article focuses primarily on obesity – not cardiovascular health per se, as is our focus. While there may be a genetic component to your “natural” exercise level, the physical and cultural environment clearly also plays a role. An obese person isn’t genetically destined for inactivity, rather predispositions can mean that some people must overcome additional factors to get fit.

Types of exercise are not created equal
This thinking also has limited benefits because it fails to take into account the fact that all types of exercise are not created equal. Several research studies at CERG have compared high- and medium-intensity exercise, and found that aerobic interval training (representing high-intensity exercise) is more effective than continuous moderate exercise. High-intensity training improves the prognosis for heart attack patients compared to usual care both in the short and longer term, and yields better health improvements in patients with metabolic syndrome. Therefore, conflating all types of exercise and expecting a universal result at best leads to an imprecise conclusion.

Still, on those blustery fall nights, it sure is tempting to think that braving the cold to go outside and do some interval training is a waste of your time…

Written by Hanna Sofie Ellingsen at CERG.

Fredag er bloggdag

Dekanus for DMF Stig Slørdal blogger hver fredag. Dagens blogg handlet om oppbygging av ledende forskningsgrupper i sammenheng med utdelingen av Anders Jahres medisinske pris i 2011 til Moser og Moser, og bruk av siteringsindekser for å måle “impact,” dvs. vitenskapelig gjennomslagskraft. Skandinaviske land gjør det forskjellig, og Danmark leder med gjennomsnittsindekser på 1,07 og 1,24 i henholdsvis biomedisin og helsefag, hvor verdensgjennomsnittet er definert lik 1,0. Til sammenligning ligger Norge på 0,86 og 0,96. Ikke fryktelig imponerende, men det blir litt bedre hvis man tar for seg universitetene individuelt.

Tanken som ligger bak slike indekser er at forskning ikke bare handler om hvor mange artikler som publiseres, men hvordan de blir brukt. Blir de lest? Er de til nytte for andre forskere? Selvsagt er ikke siteringsindeksen ufeilbarlig, men det er likevel interessant at Dekanus mot slutten av innlegget bemerker at selv om UiO publiserer mye mer innenfor biomedisin har NTNU en bedre indeks. Det er et godt tegn på at forskningen her holder høy kvalitet.

NTNU satser strategisk for å bygge ledende forskningsgrupper med kompetanse på verdensnivå, og Dekanus tror det er en sammenheng med indeksene. Ved DMF ser man satsingen på forskjellige sentre, deriblant Moser og Mosers Kavli-institutt, men hvor CERG som K.G. Jebsen senter for hjertetrening helt klart også inngår. Og da er kanskje Dekanus inne på noe veldig bra…

Værgudene ser ublidt på Trondheim?

Selv om gjennomsnittlig årlig nedbørsmengde i Trondheim “bare” er 892mm (kontra Bergens 2250mm), har været likevel vært rimelig surt i det siste. I går haglet det både på turen til og fra jobben, så da er det kanskje på tide å akseptere at sykkelsesongen nærmer seg slutt. Regntøy er et “must” hvis man vil trene utendørs i Trøndelag, og da kan kanskje denne nyheten fra SINTEF komme godt med; nemlig regntøy som reparerer seg selv!

Aldri mer skal en liten rift på kneet kunne gjøre at et helt bukseben er gjennomvått når man omsider surkler inn døren etter treningsturen i pøsregnet. Nei, her skal mikrokapslene med lim ordne opp så stoffet heler seg selv. Dessverre gjenstår det fortsatt en del testing før noe produkt kommer på markedet… “Vi vet fortsatt ikke hva som vil skje hvis riftene blir mer en et par millimenter lange, og om regn vil vaske bort limet,” sier forsker Susie Jahren til Gemini.  Det er noe litt sci-fi ved det hele. We’re living in the future… 

Kanskje finnes det håp for fint vær til helgen allikevel? Da jeg vokste opp var familiekonsensusen at hvis man kunne se skygger utendørs, da var det sol. Så når man attpåtil kan se antydningen til blå himmel fra kontorvinduet må det da kunne regnes som en solskinnsdag?

Fitness calculator

Quite understandably, most people aren’t too excited about using a single number to summarize an entire aspect of their lives. After all, it seems so unsatisfactory – how can it possibly do you justice? But scientists, we love numbers. Numbers are not only convenient to work with, but there’s also something elegant in their simplicity. Numbers are nice.

So what’s your number?
I am – of course – referring to your fitness number… What’s a fitness number, you say? It’s a single number to tell you how fit you are, and therefore also revealing something important about your heart health.

Based on a study of 4,600 healthy Norwegians between 20 and 90, CERG researchers were able to make a model that uses information about how you exercise, your age, waistline and resting heart rate to calculate your fitness number.

Fitness is generally measured by finding the peak oxygen uptake, which also has proven to be a very good measure of cardiac health. It can even say something about the likelihood that your health will worsen in the short term. But measuring someone’s peak oxygen uptake is not always a practical test to run, and so the model really comes in handy. Moreover, you can find .

Check it out for yourself!
“Apocryphal scientific models are all well and nice,” I hear you say, “but how does this apply to me?” Set aside your skepticism and check it out for yourself! We made our model available through the nifty fitness calculator on our website, so you can find your number and compare yourself to others your sex and age. Exercise isn’t necessarily a competition (although it can be!), but on the other hand, you can put your fitness number to use and compete against yourself. Perhaps it’s that extra push you need to get off the couch and start exercising regularly?

So what is your fitness number? And more importantly, what are you going to do about it?

Kondiskalkulatoren finnes også på norsk!

Høyintensitetstrening mot brystkreft

Mye av vår forskning viser at høyintensitetstrening er spesielt bra for hjertehelsen, men her skriver DN om en forskningsstudie fra Canada som viser at høyintensitetstrening også kan bidra til å minske risikoen for brystkreft: http://www.dn.no/dnaktiv/article2245680.ece

4×4 interval training video

Yesterday we finally uploaded the English 4×4 interval training video! Definitely worth a watch to learn more about this very effective exercise technique.

Lenke til den norske utgaven av 4×4 intervall-videoen.

The success of a scientific paper

In scientific circles, it’s publish or perish, and as a group, CERG publishes quite a lot.
(Yep, we’re proud of it!) All the more reason to be pleased when you get this sort of email from a journal:

“The Editors of Circulation Research wish to congratulate you and your co-authors for having published one of the most downloaded recent articles in our journal. During September 2011, the PDF of your Online First article, ‘Intrinsic Aerobic Capacity Sets a Divide for Aging and Longevity,’ was downloaded and viewed over 185 times, placing it in the top tier for the month.”

It’s not just the fact that it’s nice to have so many views before your article officially is published – it will be out on October 28th – it’s really nice to see that your work is is being read. After all, so much work goes into every paper.

But it doesn’t stop there… Like most of our recently published work, we put an article summary on our website. And lo and behold, it also shows up on AlphaGalileo, at the European Fitness Association, and in a press release from the University of Michigan, our partners in this study. Not to imply that the paper doesn’t deserve the attention it’s been getting of course – it definitely does.

For the non-researchers out there, it might even seem like science-fiction. We used artificial selective breeding to produce two different kinds of rats; by mating the high-exercise capacity rats with each other, and low-exercise capacity rats with each other we got rats with innate high or low exercise capacities. In contrast to many other rat models, there was no inbreeding, in fact, we wanted varied genetic backgrounds to model a real population more closely.

Once we had our “super” rats and “prefer-to-sit-home-on-the-couch” rats, we then looked to see if there was a connection between the innate exercise ability and the rats’ health and lifespan. And there was! We followed them over several generations, and the “couch” rats had worse cardiovascular health and died sooner. Meanwhile, the happy little “super” rats stayed leaner, lived longer, had better physical activity levels and better heart health. Wow.

Accordingly, the conclusion was pretty clear. There’s a connection between the innate exercise capacity and expected lifespan, quite possibly through cardiac health. And you can bet this is of interests to humans too! Cardiovascular health has been shown to predict longevity, and if you’re genetically predisposed to a worse exercise capacity, there’s all the more reason to get out there and exercise if you want to live a longer and healthier life.

(If you want all the scientific nitty gritty, read it for yourself on PubMed.)

Written by Hanna Sofie Ellingsen at CERG.