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Exercising… but how?
We all know that, for optimal health, we need to move. But research and anecdotal experience indicate that people rarely exercise if they do not enjoy it. Workouts, for many, are something like possessions: If they don’t spark joy, they tend to be discarded.
Most experts agree that a workout’s intensity and its duration have the greatest influence on our feelings about it. In recent years, attention has been focused on short, intense workouts, typically called high-intensity interval training, because the duration is so slight, lessening the likelihood that people will be too busy to exercise. But while many people who take up high-intensity interval training report being pleased by the workouts’ brevity, they often also say that the intensity is not fun for them, which, over the long term, could discourage them from continuing.
In a new study, researchers at the University of Innsbruck in Austria decided to investigate whether emphasizing a workout´s length while playing down its intensity might increase people’s enjoyment and, potentially, participation. To find out, they recruited about 40 healthy men and women and asked them to complete a series of detailed questionnaires about their moods and level of anxiety, both at that moment and in general. Then they asked each volunteer to complete several prolonged workouts.
One of these involved hiking in the mountains. Wearing heart rate monitors, the volunteers walked in groups of three or four along a popular mountain trail that climbs sinuously and persistently; they were told to move at a brisk but not punishing pace, so that they were breathing rapidly but could converse with one another. Midway through the hike, they stopped and told researchers how strenuous the walking had felt, on a scale of 1 to 20, before descending and repeating the questionnaires about their moods. The entire walk lasted about three hours.
On a separate day, each volunteer completed virtually the same workout on a treadmill at a gym. The machines’ inclines were set to simulate the uphill hike for the first half of the workout, with flat walking after that (since the machines could not be set for negative altitude gain). Volunteers walked next to one another and were encouraged to chat. They all also completed the estimations of effort and mood.
Then on a final day, as a control session, they all sat for about three hours in a communal room at the university equipped with computers, magazines and couches, where they could surf or talk and, before and after, assess their moods. At the end, the scientists compared their mood scores and other assessments.
Although the mountain hiking turned out to have been, objectively, the most strenuous of the workouts, interestingly, almost all the participants reported that the outdoor effort had felt less strenuous to them than their time on the treadmill. And their mood scores were much higher after the outdoor hike than the treadmill workout. On the other hand, the long walk in the gym had left them almost uniformly happier and more relaxed than after sitting and using a computer or chatting for several hours. These results could have particular resonance for people who have tried brief, intense workouts and disliked them. But, of course, this study looked only at a single instance of each workout: it did not follow people to see if they would voluntarily keep walking or measure the extent to which the prolonged hikes affected their health and fitness.
(Gretchen Reynolds. www.nytimes.com, 28.06.2017. Adaptado.)
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