[cujo]

I think you're confusing a trained person training to get better with a sedentary person training to not be sedentary.

In the weight training community there's a thing everyone calls "newb gains". It's basically this study in played out in a weightroom. In a nutshell, it's that you don't need interesting training programs or massive amounts of gym time to get started. Just a few basic lifts a few times a week. Once you get a baseline, your gains level out and you have to start being smarter with your training. I'll bet a solid handshake that the same general pattern will apply here.

This study took out of shape people that didn't exercise and asked them to exercise. The program isn't so much important as is the fact that getting people doing anything strenuous ends up being beneficial.

Eventually their "gains" will level out and if they want to run a 10k in under 45 minutes, they're going to have do a lot more interesting training.

[cclements]

Good points. I'm in the camp that sees the claimed benefits of SIT as a logical extension of cardio exercise to the set/rest/set approach of weightlifting, but this study doesn't really answer that question. I'd really like to see an "equal time" comparison group to account for newb gains (e.g. MICT for 10 min vs SIT for 10 min) as well as directly compare the effect of the different approaches.