There are many who see the gym as a torture room, thinking that they must spend hours and hours inside to achieve good muscle strength. However, a study conducted by members of the Niigata University of Health and Welfare (Japan) has thrown this idea to the ground by discovering that just three seconds of weights a day is enough to achieve a positive impact on the muscles.
The research involved 39 healthy college students who had to do maximum-effort muscle contractions for three seconds a day, five days a week, a routine that spanned four weeks. Another 13 students who did not exercise during the same period served as a control group. The exercises consisted of isometric, concentric, or eccentric biceps curls, and maximal voluntary contraction force was measured before and after four weeks in all of them.
The three previous classifications of the curl are made based on how the muscle behaves when activated. In isometric contraction it is stationary under load, in concentric the muscle shortens, and in eccentric it lengthens. As for how to do it with the dumbbell, lifting the weight with the biceps is a concentric contraction, lowering the weight is an eccentric contraction, while keeping the weight parallel to the ground is isometric.
The key to brief exercise is good quality
The findings of the study, which have been published in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, have indicated that the muscular strength of the participants who did eccentric biceps curls during the four weeks increased by more than 10%, while the other two groups had a smaller increase in strength. In the control group no change in musculature was found.
If these effects are verified in other muscles, it could be possible to do a full body exercise in less than 30 seconds
But then, what is the best exercise? All showed some muscular benefit, however, the concentric lifting group improved slightly – 6.3% – in isometric strength, but not in other areas, while the isometric group only experienced an increase in eccentric strength, 7.2%. For its part, the eccentric biceps curl group had improvements in strength in all three measures: concentric increased by 12.8%, isometric by 10.2% and eccentric by 12.2%.
“The results of the study suggest that a very small amount of exercise stimulus, even 60 seconds in four weeks, can increase muscle strength. Brief, good-quality exercise can be good for your body, and every muscle contraction counts,” said Jen Nosaka, lead author of the research.
The authors have highlighted that, if it is verified that these muscular benefits with only three seconds can also be obtained in other muscles, it would be possible to do a whole body exercise in less than 30 seconds, something accessible on a day-to-day basis, which each It’s getting busier every time.
.
