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 this is part two of a special two-part series about whether or not

cardio can kill you.

If you want to hear part one, then head over to Quick and dirty tips.com and look for episode 265.

And you can also, when you're there, access the show notes to this episode, episode number 266.

That's all over at quick and dirty tips.com. So last week, we took a deep dive into a topic

that was based on a recent article and study reported on in the

Wall Street Journal. Is cardio going to kill you? You learned all about the study and you also learned

about the glaring fact that diet was completely ignored in the study. Well, this week we're jumping

straight back into the topic. Let's begin where we left off. Consideration number two is that

intensity matters. While the study at hand acknowledges that intensity for long periods of time

can cause damage to the arteries, it fails to point out the fact that intensity for shorter periods of

time can actually allow you to become just as fit without subjecting your

body to voluminous stress. For example, according to one study on the effect of high-intensity

interval training on oxidative enzymes responsible for increasing endurance, there were enormous

increases in skeletal muscle oxidative enzymes in seven weeks in subjects who did four to 10,

30-second maximum cycling sprints with four minutes of recovery between each sprint,

and they did this just three days a week.

Another six-week-long training study compared the increase in oxidative enzymes that resulted

from four to six,

30-second maximum effort cycling sprints, each followed by four and a half minutes of recovery,

...