3-minute intense exercise may beat 90-minute cycling, study finds

When we talk about exercise, most people think a good workout has to be long: a sweat session that chews up an hour or more. But what if a workout that lasts only a few minutes could send a stronger molecular signal through the body than an hour and a half of steady exercise? New research suggests something wild: just three minutes of truly all-out effort can set off a bigger wave of change in your blood than a workout thirty times longer.That’s what scientists discovered when they looked at short, intense bursts of exercise, specifically, three minutes of maximum-effort cycling, chopped up as six 30-second sprints with four-minute breaks between. After those sprints, researchers found dramatic shifts in hundreds of proteins and tiny molecules in the blood.