The 2-minute exercise that could be just as beneficial as a 30-minute spin class

Exercise can be hard to grapple with if you’re not a natural-born gym fanatic - and one of the biggest issues to contend with is fitting a workout into a busy schedule.

Well, a new study has found that benefitting your body could take you just two minutes. In fact, just 120 seconds of high-intensity exercise could be as good for you as 30 minutes of spinning.

Conducted by scientists from Victoria University in Australia, researchers asked a small number of participants to join three exercise sessions of different intensities over a specific time period - with seven days or more of rest in between.

In the first session, participants were asked to cycle continuously for 30 minutes at 50% effort. The second session saw people cycle for five four-minute time periods at 75% effort, with one-minute rest between slots. The final session got participants to perform four 30-second cycling sprints at 100% effort with a four and a half minute resting period in between.

Following the end of each session, the researchers then calculated how much energy each participant had used up by comparing a muscle biopsy from each person’s thigh before, immediately after, and three hours after finishing the workout.

The researchers found that the mitochondria - a structure that produces the energy currency of the cell - in the participants' thigh muscles were almost identical between the high-intensity slot and the longer ride.

Writing in the American Journal of Physiology, the study’s authors wrote: "This suggests that exercise may be prescribed according to individual preferences while still generating similar signals known to confer beneficial metabolic adaptations."

"These findings have important implications for improving our understanding of how exercise can be used to enhance metabolic health in the general population."

This study is an extremely small one, which means more research would be required to verify this theory, but it's certainly a good basis upon which to try out shorter bursts of high-intensity exercise, to see if that works better for you.