Breaking a Sweat

Something as simple as really pushing yourself for a couple of minutes off and on during your next workout—I mean really breaking a sweat—could save your from devastating chronic diseases.

Sometimes health problems don't happen one at a time. Often they come in groups. Metabolic syndrome works like this. It's a group of health risk factors that includes high levels of abdominal fats, triglycerides, blood pressure, and blood glucose levels and low levels of HDL cholesterol.

If you have any three of these risk factors in combination, then you have metabolic syndrome.

And you're not alone. Nearly one in four adults has metabolic syndrome. It's a serious condition that puts you at high risk for diabetes and heart disease.

You can reverse metabolic syndrome if you take the right steps. One of the best things you can do is to change the way you work out. Interval training, where you really push yourself for a couple of minutes and then work at a moderate pace for a few minutes and then repeat the cycle, can help you get rid of metabolic syndrome and restore your health.

People who do interval training instead of endurance training lose weight, improve their blood sugar control and boost their HDL cholesterol levels by up to 25%.

So next time you work out, take a stopwatch. After you warm up, take two minutes and work hard. Then for four minutes, ease off a little, but don't stop. Repeat the two-minute/four-minute cycle three to five times. This kind of workout can provide a number of health benefits… and it's shorter than your usual workout. Enjoy!

Stay well,
Danny Wallace