New York Times magazine article on the best exercise
"Let’s consider the butterfly. One of the most taxing movements in sports, the butterfly requires greater energy than bicycling at 14 miles per hour, running a 10-minute mile, playing competitive basketball or carrying furniture upstairs. It burns more calories, demands larger doses of oxygen and elicits more fatigue than those other activities, meaning that over time it should increase a swimmer’s endurance and contribute to weight control.
So is the butterfly the best single exercise that there is? Well, no. The butterfly “would probably get my vote for the worst” exercise, said Greg Whyte, a professor of sport and exercise science at Liverpool John Moores University in England and a past Olympian in the modern pentathlon, known for his swimming. The butterfly, he said, is “miserable, isolating, painful.” It requires a coach, a pool and ideally supplemental weight and flexibility training to reduce the high risk of injury."
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A lot of Times lifestyle articles seem to be written by Trustafarians, or their friends.
That said, this particular ramble addresses a training method that was discussed, more or less, in the thread about masters' practice - high-intensity interval training. The article calls it the HIT method:
In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise.
Most interesting - this researcher found that high-intensity intervals build aerobic capacity faster than long-distance training:
After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours.
Now by coincidence, I'm trying to learn butterfly. It takes me about 30 seconds to swim 25 yards, then I'm so fagged I have to rest about a minute. So it sounds like - for me, at least - butterfly is the perfect exercise.
A lot of Times lifestyle articles seem to be written by Trustafarians, or their friends.
That said, this particular ramble addresses a training method that was discussed, more or less, in the thread about masters' practice - high-intensity interval training. The article calls it the HIT method:
In his first experiments, riders completed 30 seconds of cycling at the highest intensity the riders could stand. After resting for four minutes, the volunteers repeated the interval several times, for a total of two to three minutes of extremely intense exercise.
Most interesting - this researcher found that high-intensity intervals build aerobic capacity faster than long-distance training:
After two weeks, the H.I.T. riders, with less than 20 minutes of hard effort behind them, had increased their aerobic capacity as much as riders who had pedaled leisurely for more than 10 hours.
Now by coincidence, I'm trying to learn butterfly. It takes me about 30 seconds to swim 25 yards, then I'm so fagged I have to rest about a minute. So it sounds like - for me, at least - butterfly is the perfect exercise.
