Is it Yet Time to Throw Away the Old Recipe Book and Consider High Intensity Intermittent Exercise in Clinical

The first epidemiological exercise studies in the 1950’s established a cause-effect relationship between levels of physical inactivity and cardiovascular disease. In the interim other longitudinal, cross-sectional, retrospective and prospective analyses have confirmed that physical activity is cardio-protective and also an inverse relationship exists between mortality rates and leisure time physical activity intensity. As such physical activity guidelines have emerged in the last 20 years, not only for sub-clinical, but also clinical populations. For example the American Heart Association (AHA) published 2009 exercise guidelines for people with type II diabetes [1]. The AHA publication is especially interesting as it was perhaps the first to make recommendations adjusting for both moderate- and vigorous-intensity exercise. Guidelines such as this have been primarily, but not exclusively, developed upon the relatively large volume of data from clinical exercise training trials of moderate intensity continuou