“A six-month study of more than 120 adults in their 70s found that high-intensity interval training (HIIT) may offer a key advantage over other forms of exercise”
And also the one they are least likely to perform. Even people in wheelchairs can do resistance training, not so much HIIT. I see zero people over 70, including me, performing HIIT at the gym. I am sure there are some exceptional outliers.
I wonder why they don’t consider resistance training a form of exercise. Poor quality article overall.
Resistance training can be high intensity, especially with isometrics. Hold a plank or a bridge for two minutes and get a full-body workout. Get in a squat or horse stance and hold until you feel the burn. I also like the kitchen counter pushup, not reps but a static hold, which helps repair the shoulders.
Sure, but if you’re doing resistance training, you don’t need it to be high intensity in the HIIT sense to build muscle. To talk about ways to retain muscle and not mention resistance training is just incompetence.
I still do high speed sprints twice a week, but I’m fully aware that I’ll probably have a hip fracture if I fall. And, as you noted, I also see no one my age or older doing any kind of HIIT other than me. I don’t currently see many younger people doing HIIT either, but there are a few. I suspect they know more about the best types of exercise than the large number of other people I see at the gym, especially the ones who do 10 reps of something, then sit for 2 minutes or more (looking at a cell phone) before doing 10 more reps. These people know absolutely nothing about standard circuit training or why they’re doing what they’re doing and end of wasting a lot of time.
Well, maybe I’m overly critical?
I think that it is great that you still do HIIT training.
But I must defend the guys doing 10 reps and then sitting staring at their cell phone for 2 minutes.
They are seeking muscle gain (hypertrophy). If that is their goal, they are doing the right thing. They are not wasting their time.
The Landmark Study (3 Minutes vs. 1 Minute)
The most frequently cited paper on this topic was published by Dr. Brad Schoenfeld in 2016. The study took resistance-trained men and split them into two groups: one resting 1 minute between sets, and the other resting 3 minutes.
The researchers found that the group resting for 3 minutes saw significantly greater increases in muscle thickness (hypertrophy) and maximal strength compared to the short-rest group (Schoenfeld et al., 2016).
The primary mechanism is volume load. When you rest 2 to 3 minutes, your muscles have enough time to clear metabolic waste and replenish ATP (cellular energy). This allows you to lift heavier weights for more repetitions across all of your sets. In contrast, 1-minute rest periods force you to drop the weight or do fewer reps, resulting in less total mechanical tension on the muscle.
Establishing the 2-Minute Minimum
While Schoenfeld’s study showed 3 minutes beats 1 minute, an earlier study by Ahtiainen et al. (2005) helped establish the 2-minute baseline. They compared resting 2 minutes versus 5 minutes between sets.
The results showed similar gains in muscle mass and strength between both groups (Ahtiainen et al., 2005). This indicates that 2 minutes is a sufficient minimum for hypertrophic adaptations; extending the rest all the way to 5 minutes does not yield additional muscle growth, though it takes considerably more time in the gym.
The Scientific Consensus
A systematic review aggregating multiple trials on this topic confirmed these findings. The review concluded that while muscle can grow with both short and long intervals, using long rest intervals (greater than 60 seconds, optimally 2+ minutes) provides a clear advantage for maximizing muscle hypertrophy in trained individuals (Grgic et al., 2017).
Thanks. As Johnny Carson would have said, “I did not know that.”