Alf is delighted to report good news for couch potatoes: exercising for half an hour helps you lose 25% MORE weight than going for a full hour.
This good news is brought to us by the UK’s Daily Mail, which says overweight people who exercise for short periods of time are happier and more motivated to pursue a healthy lifestyle.
Tests have shown that cutting an exercise regime in half holds great benefits for people who are overweight, increasing their chances of shedding the pounds.
The shorter exercise sessions left slimmers happier, with more energy and motivation for pursuing a healthy lifestyle, while those who spent twice as long in the gym were more likely to feel burned out, researchers at the University of Copenhagen found.
The newspaper quotes a Professor Bente Stallknecht, from the university’s Department of Biomedical Sciences, who said:
‘Obesity is a complex social problem requiring a multidisciplinary approach.
‘We combined data from biomedical studies of the subjects’ bodies with ethnological data on their experiences during the 13-week trial period.
‘This enabled us to explain the background for the surprising fact that 30 minutes of daily exercise is just as beneficial as a full hour of hard fitness training.
‘The “lightweight” group of exercisers appear to get more energy and be more motivated in relation to pursuing a healthy lifestyle.’
The cheering news for an exercise-averse bloke like Alf is this…
At at the end of a 13-week trial undertaken by 60 overweight men, those who exercised for a shorter period lost around a kilo more on average than the slimmers who spent an hour in the gym at a time, who shed 2.7kg over the period.
Dunno about you.
But the way it seems to your hard-working but sparsely exercising MP is this: if halving your exercise can help a feller lose 25% more than going for a full hour, well it stands to reason that no exercise at all would help him…
Do the maths, folks. Do the maths.
Alf Grumble 