Humor me for a moment and picture Ben Franklin.

You’re seeing him, I’m sure, as he was later in life: a gone-to-fat socialite from a decade or so of decadent food. Prior to that, however, the Colonies’ answer to Leonardo da Vinci — over the course of his 84 years, Franklin was a typesetter, printer, author, scientist, inventor, and diplomat, not to mention a Founding Father — also served as their Jack LaLanne.

While a young adult working as a typesetter in London, Franklin was nicknamed Water-American for he drank water throughout the workday while his co-workers drank pints of beer. They did so because the belief was beer provided the energy and nutrients needed to handle the heavy lifting required of their job.

Franklin argued against that practice with more than words. He would run about the printshop while others walked — and carry two heavy trays of lead type up and down the shop’s stairs while the beer-imbibers struggled to lug one.

Prior to his time in London, Franklin taught himself to swim and became quite adept at longer distances. So much so, that he once swam three and a half miles on the Thames to prove his prowess to friends.

When Franklin returned to the Colonies and began publishing Poor Richard’s Almanack, he often included his health-and-fitness beliefs to it. Such as, “Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise,” “Eat to live; live not to eat,” “A full belly makes a bad brain,” and “To lengthen thy life, lessen thy meals.”

If a hard bout of lifting and swinging handheld weights or leaping (jumping done with a pole, though sometimes without, for distance and height) left Franklin sore the next day and his friends commented upon it, he would repeat the aphorism found in the 1745 edition of the almanac. “There are no pains without gains.”

That observation from a man as sagacious as he was famous is why I asked you to humor me initially. Because for the last 25 years or so, we’ve all had a good laugh at those leotard-clad ladies, muscle-bound men, gung-ho coaches, and over-the-top exercise instructors still seemingly living in the 1980s and barking out, “No pain, no gain.”

It may be time, though, to take that modern saying a bit more seriously — or at least the concept behind it. For a study published in the September issue of Cell Reports Medicine finds that a way to exercise we all find somewhat painful is particularly gainful.

Researchers at Rockefeller University in Manhattan recruited 19 healthy young men and had them exercise in one of two ways. Once a week for eight weeks, nine of them did 90 minutes of cycling at a pace determined to be of moderate intensity, while the other 10 incorporated 6 sets of 30-second all-out sprints followed by a 4-minute recovery as part of a ride that took far less time.

Before, immediately after, and three hours after each ride, researchers took blood from the participants. By doing so, they found the sprint workout “elicit[ed] greater circulating protein and metabolite responses” than the longer moderate ride.

These proteins have been linked to better health.

Data held in the UK Biobank on more than 53,000 individuals, for example, shows a positive association between them and a lower risk of both cardiovascular and metabolic disease. The study done at Rockefeller University found that of the 33 proteins associated with this lower risk, 32 were increased by the sprint workout, but only three by the moderate cycling.

More than a quarter of these proteins have also been linked to slower biological aging. Moreover, the researchers discovered that human fat cells exposed to blood collected after the sprint workout underwent changes in gene activity that positively affected how they process fuel, respond to hormones, and sense the availability of nutrients.

“What’s exciting here,” Paul Cohen, MD, PhD, and head of the Weslie R. and William H. Janeway Laboratory of Molecular Metabolism at Rockefeller University writes in a press release about the study, “is that just a few minutes of intense exercise can trigger a significant molecular response [and that] we still see it after eight weeks of training, which tells us this response isn’t simply a product of the body struggling to keep up with unfamiliar stress. It may be that the responses we observed are intrinsic to intense exercise.”

And it may be that those responses are some of the ones you seek, so it may be time for you to do what Ben Franklin says. Without, of course, using a pole to leap about.

Seriously though, it’s good for those able to exercise moderately to go all-out for several short bursts once or twice a week and to embrace the pain that accompanies it.

But, and this is a rather big but, don’t ever do so unless you feel up to it and your doctor allows it.