Study finds that breaking up your exercise is more effective, but Tim Dowling remains to be convinced

Let me start by saying that I am not looking for ways to be more tired. I’m tired enough. However, a new study suggesting that exercise punctuated by frequent breaks requires more energy than “steady-state” exertion has a certain counterintuitive attraction: I can exercise better by resting more.

The results of the study, published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, are striking. Volunteers on treadmills and stair climbers used 20-60% more oxygen when walking in bursts of 10-30 seconds than they did covering the same distance without stopping. This apparently has something to do with the sheer inefficiency of stop-start activity. “We found that when starting from rest, a significant amount of oxygen is consumed to start walking,” said the study’s author, Francesco Luciano. “We incur this cost regardless of whether we then walk for 10 or 30 seconds, so it proportionally weighs more for shorter rather than longer bouts.” Would this strategy, I wondered, work for me?