The Quick & The Buff: Can 10 minutes' exercise really make a difference?

The Quick & The Buff: Can 10 minutes' exercise really make a difference? Is
there an optimum hour of the day for working out?

Hours, minutes and seconds
How much of your day should you devote to exercise to stay healthy?
According to Australian Government advice, adults should spend 30 minutes performing moderate physical activity five days a week. But, if that doesn't suit your lifestyle or body clock, there are other options.
As little as 10 minutes of exercise a day can have significant health benefits, from helping to whittle waistlines to controlling blood pressure. Indeed, a recent study in the International Journal of Cancer showed that just 10 minutes a week of exercise can reduce the risk of prostate cancer by 11 per cent.
Experts agree that more time spent exercising is not necessarily better. The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) says that often, people who plod away for lengthy periods on exercise equipment are clocking up "dead miles". In its guidelines, the ACSM says that 30 minutes of high-intensity exercise (that's at 80 per cent of your maximum aerobic capacity, a level at which you would be puffing and sweating) is as good as an hour at a workload of 60 per cent.
However, if you've been a bit out of practice you'll still need to work up to that intensity. As Adrian Heffernan, health and fitness specialist with YMCA Victoria, explains: "Research does support this theory; however, consideration needs to be given to an individual's fitness. Too high a training intensity for less fit individuals can cause a high amount of discomfort and increase risk of injury. To maximise results, we need to gradually increase the intensity of our training over time. When people are beginning exercise, 60 per cent intensity is a more realistic intensity for them. Getting up to 80 per cent of your maximum heart rate can be challenging and to be able to maintain that for deconditioned people isn't realistic.
"Certainly, at a higher intensity, you're going to burn more calories and make your heart stronger, depending on your level of conditioning and depending on your capacity to actually work at those intensive levels," Heffernan says.
Meanwhile, a number of high-profile American fitness experts believe that strengthening sessions needn't drag on. Hollywood trainer Ken Hutchins says that by using weights that are a high percentage of the maximum you can lift and slowing the pace of each exercise (instead of the usual four to five seconds it takes to lift and lower a weight, take 10 seconds to raise and 10 to lower it), a weight session need last no longer than eight to 20 minutes.
"A heavy load on the muscles means they gradually get fatigued to the point at which they can no longer lift," says Hutchins. "Within two to three minutes of exercising a muscle this slowly, it reaches a threshold. The body then gets a signal to make that muscle grow stronger."
A study published in the Journal of Sports Medicine and Physical Fitness last year showed that short but intense regimes can produce 50 per cent greater improvements in muscle tone than ordinary strength work-outs. Put simply: "The longer that your muscles are under the tension of weight/resistance, the more muscle endurance benefits you will gain," says Heffernan.

Time of day
Professor Tom Reilly, an expert in chronobiology and exercise at Liverpool John Moores University in England, says that most research points to late afternoon and early evening as the best time to work out. In his own studies, Reilly found that when people were asked to perform the same work-out at different times of the day (5am, 11am, 5pm and 11pm), they felt they were working hardest first thing.
"Body temperature rises by a few degrees in the afternoon, warming the muscles and connective tissues, which contributes to an improvement in performance capabilities, " he says. "Muscle strength is also better later in the day."
Top swimmers were shown to suffer a 10 per cent drop in performance during morning training sessions. Researchers at California's San Jose University also showed that reaction times and hand-eye coordination, especially in sports such as tennis and football, improved after midday.
Exercise in the morning and you are also more likely to catch a cold. A study in the British Journal of Sports Medicine showed that an early-morning swim left immune systems working less efficiently.
It is no coincidence, says Reilly, that most Olympic and world records are won in the late afternoon: "Most people experience a post-lunch dip in exercise performance between 2pm and 3pm, but generally their physical parameters improve as body temperature gradually rises throughout the afternoon. Stopping off at the gym on the way home from work is ideal as the body performs at its best between 4pm and 7pm."
Exercising much later than that could be counter-productive. As your body winds down, you risk disturbing its biorhythm.
Heffernan says: "Most people have difficulty finding the time to exercise, so the simple message is that any time is a good time. The benefits of worrying about different times are so marginal that it shouldn't be as much a concern as actually getting moving. When training for weight management, morning can be a good time given that - if you wake up - you might have eaten eight hours prior, your glucose levels are low and you can tap into your fats a little bit quicker."
For early risers who prefer to exercise before work, sports scientists of Glasgow University, Scotland, revealed last year that morning gym work-outs are better mood-boosters. The research, published in the journal Appetite, showed how women in an 8.15am aerobics class enjoyed a 50 per cent boost to their feelings of wellbeing compared with 20 per cent of those who worked out at 7.15pm.
"In the morning, the exercise seemed to feel much harder, but this means the emotional benefit is much greater," says Dr Siobhan Higgins, who led the study.
But all experts agree that working out at any time is better than not working out at all and that consistency is the key to progress. American studies have shown that everyone benefits from working out at the same time each day: weight lifters who trained at the same time of day consistently gained more power than those who worked out at different times of the day.
[SMH]