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Comment by mahesh_rm | Hacker News Reader

Jumping cold out of your couch/chair and sprinting 5 seconds every hour, multiple times a day, sounds to me like an optimized 'quickly destroy most of your body joints' routine.

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It happened on a stationary bicycle trainer -> Low load on joints, as most of the weight rests on the saddle and handlebars.

The University of Bath minimal HIIT protocol also used stationary bikes (3 20" intervals 3x/week).

Keep in mind that research in sports science is biased towards equipment like bikes because they make the study so much easier - safer to use, ensure consistent form, easier to get approval for the study and there's no need to coach the participants all that much.

Getting 20 inches on a stationary bike can be hard enough.

(couldn't resist. I actually didn't know " ("double prime") could mean seconds.)

Both temporal and angular!

I'm more worried about repetitive stress injury from being typing and using the mouse.

To me - it sounds like a great way to throw up or at least get stomach sickness.

I can't imagine going full send with no warm up and not suffering some sort of issue after stopping.

Depends on your health. I'm 50 and healthy, I can easily "full send" a 30 or 60 second sprint. I have friends my age and younger who probably can't, for different reasons.

Warm up for a 20 second sprint on a stationary bike? Getting on the bike would be enough warm up...

I don't know how to put this kindly, but eh... if you can't exercise for 20 seconds, you might be a bit out of shape.

Your warm-up accrues though. You're doing a little bit of exercise every 12 minutes for 8 hours.

You're not going to get sick.

Nitpick: the 4-second sprints weren't evenly distributed into each hour. They were done in sets of 5 with 45-second rest periods between sets.

You won't be cold though, because you're doing 4sec of exercise 5 times an hour.

You can do low impact. Burpees aren't too rough.

Burpees are actually super high impact. Done warm, let alone cold, they can cause patellar tendonopathy, back strains and hamstring strains.

This paper says cycling - I’d be inclined to agree. Obviously that’s a barrier to entry, because you’d want an indoor stationary bike. On low resistance settings the risk of injury would be very low coming in cold.

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