But there are situations where it is challenging to sleep longer, to, you know, sleep in, to do all these things, because maybe you're a new parent, right? And you have to wake up and your sleep will be compromised. There's absolutely nothing you can do because of it. There's other things as well, right? I mean, jet lag, things like that. So there is another way to improve metabolic health even when you're not sleeping optimally. And that takes us full circle back to the beginning of the talk with high-intensity interval training. So high-intensity interval training has shown to be a very robust way to improve metabolic health when you are sleep restricted. So there have been studies showing that high-intensity interval training, if you do three sessions over five days of also being sleep restricted, so sleeping four hours less per night, you can still improve your circadian rhythm, you can still improve your glucose tolerance, your mitochondrial function and biomarkers of mitochondrial function and mitochondrial biogenesis. And, you know, I mean, this is important because, again, the glucose regulation. So you’re doing that high-intensity interval training. Well, part of the way that that high-intensity interval training, I mean, part of the way that sleep restriction impairs glucose regulation is it makes your muscle less responsive to glucose. And so what is high-intensity interval training doing? It's doing the exact opposite, right? It's increasing GLUT4 transporters, and it's bringing the glucose into your muscles. So you're really countering some of that negative effect of poor sleep on your muscle, even doing high-intensity interval training before you know you're going to be sleep restricted. So I got on my Peloton yesterday. I went hard right before I got on my flight from California. I knew I was going to lose some sleep because it's 3 hours ahead in Florida. Doing high-intensity training before you're going to be sleep restricted still mostly rescues the high blood glucose and acute insulin resistance that's caused by sleep restriction.

So, yet again, just really important with respect to tools that we have at our disposal to help mitigate some of the effects of chronic sleep loss or even acute sleep loss. A lot of those protocols, again, are the ones we've discussed. The Tabata, the Wingate, the conventional one-minute-on, one-minute-off, and the Norwegian 4×4 HIIT protocols are options. A lot of HIIT protocols out there that people can do, or you just do your exercise snacks as well. I mean, that also has been shown to increase glucose homeostasis. As I mentioned, the ten bodyweight squats.

And I do want to mention one last study before we end on time. And that is again, there's lots of data out there to be harvested from the UK Biobank data and there's been studies that have identified people that sleep fewer than 7 hours or greater than 9 hours a night have a higher all-cause mortality. However, if those people are physically active and they're getting, and they're meeting the guidelines for physical activity, 75 minutes a week of intense, vigorous exercise or 150 minutes a week of moderate intensity exercise, they do not have a higher all-cause mortality. They have the same mortality risk as someone that's getting good sleep. Yet again, exercise can forgive a lot of sins and there's no reason to not do a time-efficient type of high-intensity interval training workout. It’s, you know, time-efficient. It’s easy. Exercise snacks—I mean, there’s all the evidence there. We just have to implement it, make it part of your hygiene. Like you brush your teeth every morning, you do your HIIT.