How Much Exercise Do You Really Need?
Zero exercise is not enough. Walking every day is probably good. And if you’re training for a marathon, you’ll be on your feet for a couple of hours of hard training every week. But what is the benchmark for someone who is just trying to cram enough healthy exercise into their life? Let’s deal with this.
Fortunately, all major health organizations agree on this. World Health Organization, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, American Heart Association adheres to the following guidelines for aerobic exercise:
- 150 minutes per week of moderate-intensity exercise, such as walking, ideally divided into 30 minutes per day for five days.
- 75 minutes per week of vigorous exercise, such as jogging, ideally three 25-minute blocks
- This only counts if you do 10 minutes or more in each session and you have to spread out the sessions throughout the week (so you can’t take one 90 minute spin session and assume you’re done).
If you are walking around the area, follow the first recommendation. If you like hard workouts but don’t want to change into your gym clothes every day, you can simply stick to the 75 minute recommendation. And feel free to mix and match. Here are some possibilities:
- Walk 15 minutes to and from work every weekday (5 x 30 minutes = 150 moderate).
- Run Monday / Wednesday / Friday, 2-3 miles each (3 x 25 minutes = 75 vigorous).
- Take a 90-minute cycling lesson and go for an after-dinner hike on at least a few other days of the week (1 x 90 minutes = 90 energetic, plus maybe 3 x 15 = 45 moderate).
- Take a 30-minute easy bike ride on Monday. Try a 45-minute water aerobics class on Wednesday. Take a short hike on Saturday. Mow your lawn for an hour on Saturday. (30 + 45 + 30 + 60 = 165 moderate)
If you don’t understand what counts in each category, the UK NHS offers a list of “moderate” and “active” interventions here .
If you are quite athletic, then the above will not seem special to you. Good news! WHO has set a secondary goal for people like you. It’s simple: just double the above. So you can aim for 150 minutes of vigorous activity per week:
- Two of those killer 90-minute activities, Monday and Thursday
- Three-mile run every weekday
- One hour martial arts classes three times a week.
… or, to meet the demands of moderate activity, you can walk every day for an hour before breakfast, a favorite pastime of energetic grandparents who will probably never die. (To be honest, we’re talking about recommendations for people under the age of 65.)
So what about the upper limit? From a public health perspective, it is not. The bigger, the better. (And even if you do less than recommended, everything is better than nothing .) However, as a person, you can do more exercise than your body is ready for. Don’t jump from a life of casual walks to a marathon workout plan. And if you’re on this marathon workout plan and you’re feeling worn out, take a break already .
Strength, flexibility and more
So far, we’ve talked about aerobic exercise, in which you move constantly (or perhaps take short intervals between work and rest) and your heart rate increases. But there are other important forms of exercise as well. The WHO and other organizations recommend doing “high-intensity muscle-strengthening exercises” two days a week, which includes whatever you think in terms of sets and reps. (Three sets of 8-10 reps is a good structure to start with.)
It can be anything that challenges your muscles, and where the 10th repetition is much more difficult than the first: weight lifting , exercise with weights or exercise with its own weight, such as push-ups. So if you run three days a week but have more time to spare, don’t fit into extra runs; try adding two days at the gym instead.
In addition, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends two other types of exercise that you might otherwise forget:
- Two to three days a week that include stretching, ideally stretching each major muscle group for 60 seconds. It can be several short segments of 10-30 seconds each.
- Two to three days a week, including neuromuscular training. Think of it as hand-eye coordination and its full-body equivalent. Anything related to balance, coordination, or attention to gait falls into these categories.
Both of them can fit in with your other workouts. Stretching works well during a cool-down session after a core workout, or some people prefer to use it as a warm-up. If you perform functional movements, such as lunges, that challenge your balance and coordination, you are working on neuromuscular training.