Try High-Intensity Interval Training. You Might Like It. - The New York Times

Many inactive adults who tried a sampling of exercises preferred intense efforts to gentler workouts.

People who have never tried intense interval training might be surprised to find that the workouts can be more appealing than they anticipate, according to an interesting new study of people’s emotional reactions to different types of workouts.

The study, which involved inactive adults sampling intervals and other types of exercise, often for the first time, found that some — although not all — of them preferred the intense efforts to gentler workouts.

So, for the new study, which was published in August in Psychology of Sport & Exercise, researchers at the University of British Columbia, in Kelowna, recruited 30 sedentary but otherwise healthy young men and women who said that they had not tried intense interval training before.

The researchers invited the men and women to the lab and talked to them there, at some length, about what they had heard about interval training and more-traditional exercise, including whether they thought they would be able to complete such workouts and enjoy them, or not.

Then the researchers asked the volunteers to exercise.

So, as a final step in the study, the researchers asked the volunteers to go home and work out on their own for a month, keeping exercise logs, then return to the lab to talk at length with the researchers again.

But many also threaded some sort of interval training into their weekly workouts, although few of these sessions replicated the structured intervals from the lab.

Most interesting, during their subsequent, prolonged interviews with the researchers, the volunteers who interval trained on their own said they felt more engaged and motivated during those workouts than in the longer, continuous-intensity sessions, even when the intervals were physically draining.