We are all at the mercy of time and are ageing as we read this. Ageing often results in the degenerative loss of significant muscle mass and strength starting as early as the fourth or fifth decade of life. If you combine this with the fact that 45% of women and 33% of men do not meet the current physical activity guidelines, it is no wonder why we see such a loss in muscle mass and strength. The good news is that exercise is an effective stimulus for increasing muscle mass, losing weight, and maintaining cardiometabolic health, irrespective of age.
Current exercise guidelines recommend that middle-aged individuals (age 40 to 65) should engage in a combination of endurance and resistance exercise (RE) to improve cardiometabolic health and quality of life. It is often recommended that individuals should complete five 30-min sessions of moderate-intensity endurance exercise and two sessions of RE per week, therefore, requiring up to seven days of exercise per week. As you might have guessed, seven days of exercise proves a significant barrier to most.
Research conducted by Pugh, J.K., Faulkner, S.H., Turner, M.C. et al. concluded that combining a HIIT session after a single bout of RE does not reduce the gains -- specifically, HIIT does not interfere with the increase in type-I-specific total. Therefore, concurrent RE + HIIT may offer a time-efficient way to maximize the physiological benefits from a single bout of exercise in sedentary, overweight/obese, middle-aged individuals.
Pugh, J.K., Faulkner, S.H., Turner, M.C. et al. European Journal of Applied Physiology (2018) 118: 225.
