Three minutes of total exercise may do something that an hour and a half of steady cycling cannot.
Researchers at Rockefeller University compared how the human body responds to workouts performed at very different intensities. Their findings, reported by Science Daily, showed that six 30-second all-out sprints changed nearly one-quarter of the proteins measured in the blood immediately after exercise. Ninety minutes of continuous moderate cycling altered less than one-quarter of one percent of those same proteins.
Moderate treadmill running fell between the two. It affected more proteins than cycling did, but still far fewer than the brief sprint session.
The sprint workout also changed more than 200 metabolites and rapidly increased levels of proteins tied to blood vessel growth, tissue remodeling, and hormonal signaling. Some of those proteins appeared to reach the bloodstream through a fast cell-signaling process called ectodomain shedding. Rather than being newly produced, pieces of proteins already sitting on the surface of cells were cut away and sent into circulation quickly.
The researchers also tested how human fat cells responded to blood collected right after sprinting. Those cells showed widespread changes in gene activity, including shifts in how they processed fuel, reacted to hormones, and detected nutrient availability.
Moderate exercise produced a much slower reaction. A rise in fatty acids and liver-derived proteins did not appear in the bloodstream until three hours after the workout ended. Fat cells exposed to blood collected after moderate cycling showed only small changes in gene activity by comparison.
The team then compared the proteins that responded to exercise with health data from more than 53,000 participants in the UK Biobank. Many of those proteins were linked to lower risks of cardiovascular and metabolic disease. The pattern was especially clear for obesity, type 2 diabetes, and other metabolic disorders. Among 33 proteins associated with lower disease risk, 32 were altered by sprinting. Only three were affected by moderate exercise. More than one-quarter of those same proteins were also linked to slower biological aging.
