My name's Beth Phillips and I'm a Research Associate here at the School of Biomedical
Sciences. We're just about to kick off an EU FP7 funded project, which is kind of twofold
in its main aims. One is to create a genetic predictor of whether people will respond or
not respond to high intensity interval training and the other is to assess the efficacy of
that training regime.
And go!
We're looking for 60 volunteers, males and females, between the ages of 18 and 50. And
at the moment, the inclusion criteria states that they have to be sedentary, that's the
primary inclusion criteria, which will be assessed through a physical activity questionnaire
and also an accelerometer. We'd like some couch potatoes, ideally with a BMI over 27,
so slightly overweight. And we will also be assessing if they have impaired glucose tolerance.
So what we really want is people who are at a slightly heightened risk of either cardiovascular
or metabolic disease, so that we can see if we can bring that risk chance down by doing
the exercise.
Awesome! Good Work! Keep it up!
HIT, or High Intensity Exercise Training, has been around for a long time, but it used
to be based on something called the traditional Wingate method. And the Wingate method involved
all-out exercise above maximal. So it was really, really hard and generally it was only
used as a training method for elite athletes or for actual sportspeople. Martin Gibala,
who is one of the partners for the EU FP7 is based in Canada at McMaster University,
and he's devised a time-efficient exercise training programme based on one minute of
high intensity work and then one minute of rest. But the high-intensity work is just
below your maximal effort level, so it's not supra-maximal like the old style used to be.
They've done this work in patients with cardiac failure and COPD and diabetes and overweight
women, and they find that all of them have found this exercise regime to be perfectly
tolerable. But also the time efficiency of it is something that we think will really
help with the health promotion aspect of it. So people can come in and it's only one 15-minute
session, three times a week, and that's it, that's their exercise requirements done.
Keep it there!
They come in and they have a health screening session which in itself a lot of people find
to be quite beneficial, and quite nice, just to have their heart checked and their bloods
checked and that sort of thing. And then after they've had their screening session, as long
as everything passes, we begin what we call baseline monitoring. Baseline monitoring involves
them wearing an Actiheart, which is an accelerometer that they wear for seven days continuously,
just on two little ECG pads that are stuck onto their chests. And that tells us how much
activity they do or don't do. Once they've done that, they enter this room here and that's
for a clinical study. So this is where we get all of our baseline measures before they
start any training. They have a DEXA body scan and it gives us a measure of fat mass,
muscle mass and also bone mineral density and content. And then after that, they'll
have a muscle biopsy, taken from the vastus lateralis of the thigh under local anaesthetic
by one of our medics. After that, they have a three hour oral glucose tolerance test which
basically involves them drinking a sugary drink and then us following their blood profile
for three hours from a single cannula that's inserted into their arm. And then the final
thing they do is, they do VO2 max test. A VO2 max test is performed on the bikes and
it gives us a measure of their maximal exercise basically, and then from that we can determine
how hard we need to set their intensity during their training programme.
Really well done! Keep it going!
The training programme lasts for six weeks, like I said, three times a week, each session
lasting about 15 minutes. And then we repeat all the experiments that we've done before
they started the training so we can see how effective it's been.
Good stuff! Come on, come on, harder!
They have a two minute warm-up, of relatively moderate intensity. They then do one minute
of high-intensity exercise followed by one minute of rest, one minute of high intensity
exercise, one minute of rest. And this is repeated seven times.
Nearly there, then time for a rest!
It's the same relative intensity for everyone. So everyone works hard. But it's as hard as
they can work, not as hard as anyone could work.
Awesome! Well done! Well done!
So what we're really focusing on is improvements in fitness, so cardiovascular fitness measured
through your VO2 max and also improvements in your metabolic health status.
Five, four, three, two, one and rest! Thank you very much!