Welcome to the Get Fit Guys quick and dirty tips to slim down and shape up. My name is Ben Greenfield. I'm the Get Fit Guy,

and today you're going to get six ways to get big gains in cardio fitness with something called

peripheral heart action. When I attended University of Idaho, there was one particularly difficult area of the

enormous student gym that I affectionately referred to as the hallway of pain.

Basically, this hallway, which was actually called the weight machine circuit,

consisted of a series of weight machines

and cardio equipment arranged in one long line. But the equipment wasn't randomly or haphazardly

placed. Instead, the first machine was an upper body machine or exercise, then there was a lower

body machine or exercise, then an upper, then a lower, et cetera, for a total of about 16 different stations.

Well, to make the circuit even more tortuous or motivating, depending on your outlook,

there was a green light on the wall that would flash for 30 seconds. During this 30 seconds,

you'd lift as hard as you could for as many repetitions as possible.

Then for 15 seconds, a red light would replace the green light and a loud beep would sound.

This was your rest period, which really only consisted of rapidly hurrying to the next machine in line

and just barely getting ready for your next exercise.

This workout seemed incredibly effective at building my cardio fitness and my muscle gains

simultaneously, but I only learned just this week, nearly 10 years later, that there's a name

for it.

It's called peripheral heart action training, or PHA. And a recent study entitled PHA training as a valid

substitute to high intensity interval training to improve resting cardiovascular changes and

autonomic adaptation delves into this very thing. So besides not being given the awkward acronym,

fat, which was a seemingly safe choice by the researchers, what exactly is peripheral

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