A New Study Suggests You Can Get Stronger in Only 3 Seconds a Day

Getting the perfect summer body requires blood, sweat, and tears spilled in the gym for countless hours. Yes, generally this is true, but brace yourself because science might have thrown us the curveball of the century with a new study.

Bright Side wants to show you how you can get stronger by setting aside only 3 seconds a day.

A study shows a 3-second exercise could improve strength.

In the study, which was published in the Scandanavian Journal of Medicine and Science in Sports, 39 university students were picked to perform just one muscle exercise for 3 seconds a day, 5 days a week.

There were 3 groups in this experiment. The first one did an eccentric bicep curl, which means they were focusing on lowering the weight from their shoulders down. The second group was doing a variation of the exercise, called the isometric bicep curl, which is lifting the weight up to their shoulders. Then there was a third control group, just chilling and not doing any kind of exercise.

The results

We know you are eager to hear the results, so let’s cut to the chase. The people doing the eccentric bicep curl had a 12% increase in strength, the second group doing the isometric curl had a less significant increase in strength, and the chill group didn’t notice any changes. Well, that surely sounds promising, but don’t ditch your workout plan for this 3-second exercise just yet.

It doesn’t really replace regular exercise.

Personal trainers remind us that physical health has many components — maintaining and achieving good mobility, taking care of our respiratory system, and bettering our muscular condition, just to name a few. So to think that there is some kind of shortcut to achieving physical stability is a little naive. Yes, the study showed that the 3-second exercise promoted some strength gains, but it doesn’t account for building muscle.

We also must acknowledge the fact that the sample size in the study was rather small. Also, they might have benefited from something called newbie gains, when inexperienced lifters gain strength faster than gym veterans.

The people that can benefit

For most of us, single biceps curls won’t give us the confidence of Thor, nor will it give us his bulging muscles. However, this discovery may still benefit some people in a positive manner. Let’s take, for example, elderly people who suffer from muscle mass and strength decline. Such an extensible workout routine might be a sufficient way for them to maintain their physical abilities in some capacity.

It can also serve as a morale boost for people who believe that the gym is a super scary place and believe change requires an enormous effort.

What do you think about these findings? Are you willing to test it out yourself? Drop a comment.