You know how important exercise is to a heathy lifestyle. It plays a key role in disease prevention. But making it to the gym on a daily basis isn’t always easy. Fortunately, staying active doesn’t have to mean spending hours at the gym. There are plenty of workouts you can do from home to help incorporate activity and movement into your daily routine. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) focuses on short bursts of intense exercise that stimulate your mitochondria to work harder.
Even if you’re short on time, or you can’t make it to the gym, you can still do a HIIT workout each day — guaranteed. So take your excuses, throw them out the window and try the Nitric Oxide Dump. It’s a four-minute HIIT workout that can be done absolutely anywhere, and several Mercola staff members set out to prove just how versatile the Nitric Oxide Dump really is. Press “play” on the video above to watch them perform the workout here, there and everywhere!
Despite the video’s comedic effect, the Nitric Oxide Dump really can provide your body with multiple health benefits. Here’s how to do it:
- Start by performing 10 repetitions of each movement, then work your way up to 20 repetitions as your fitness level increases.
- Warm up first by performing stretches to open up the shoulders and prevent injury
- Perform 10 squats
- Perform 10 alternating arm raises
- Perform 10 non-jumping jacks by raising the shoulders only but not lifting your feet off the ground
- Perform 10 shoulder presses
- Repeat the cycle for a total of four rounds
Benefits of the Nitric Oxide Dump Workout
When performed daily, multiple times a day, the Nitric Oxide Dump can help provide health benefits by:
- Improving age-related decline in your muscle mitochondria — The Nitric Oxide Dump may assist with counteracting mitochondrial decline by forcing your mitochondria to replicate themselves in response to the higher energy requirement demanded by the workout. This can help slow some of the effects of biological aging.
- Increasing your VO2 max — VO2 max is the maximum amount of oxygen your body can handle while exercising. As a measure of your cardiovascular endurance, the higher your VO2 max, the greater your stamina.
- Reducing insulin resistance — Research has proven high-intensity exercise may help decrease insulin resistance, a known precursor to Type 2 diabetes.
- Targeting your large muscle groups to promote weight loss — The Nitric Oxide Dump features a series of movements that target your large muscle groups such as your arms, shoulders and thighs. Doing the exercises correctly will yield both anabolic and metabolic benefits, which will promote both weight loss and fat loss throughout your body over time.
- Triggering mitochondrial biogenesis for whole-body benefits — Exercise can promote mitochondrial changes that have the potential to deliver whole-body benefits, including declines in mitochondrial biogenesis and mitochondrial protein quality that are typically influenced by aging.