What are the Physical Activity Guidelines?
Simply put, the guidelines state that based on the body of scientific research, an exercise practice that reduces risk of chronic disease and promotes long-term health should include two components:
#1) 150+ minutes per week of moderate-intensity cardio, or 75+ minutes per week of vigorous intensity cardio, or any combination of moderate and vigorous cardio to achieve the same effective dose
AND
#2) 2 days per week of muscle-strengthening activity
That’s it. In this piece I will focus on the cardio component, though both are important and show independent and combined benefits for your longevity.
So the goal is 150 or more minutes per week of moderate cardio, or the vigorous plus moderate equivalent. There is no upper limit, it is perfectly safe to build up steadily over time as you adapt, and see how it affects the health outcomes you seek.
In a holistic view finding enough is the work. You can consider the time and energy it takes to do more cardio versus how it makes you feel, your weekly time and energy budget, and reflect on whether there are other areas of your health you’d like to focus on, including just enjoying life.
My little anecdote: if other life areas are stable enough (sleep, stress, etc.) and I’m doing between 150-300 minutes per week, I feel somewhere between good to great overall. “Good” and “great” existing in the reality of my now 41 year-old body, and including a normal spectrum of bodily feelings throughout the day and week. No fantasies of healthy lifestyle meaning “I feel amazing all of the time,” please. I’m still somewhat tired waking up in the morning and going to bed in the evening, mildly sore and achey some of the time, and doing this much cardio is effortful.
If I push for 300-400 minutes per week by doing longer sessions or more of them in a week, I feel more tired some of the time, but still “good” on balance. And if I try for more than 400 minutes because I’m training for an endurance event or something like that I feel pretty tired a lot of the time, and generally feel the need to reduce other activities, sleep more than normal, scale back social activities, manual labor, and tend to avoid stress in general. Suffice to say I don’t do this often. The richness of life — for me, for now — is in the multitudes.
This is part of what I mean by finding enough, because in my experience most people I’ve worked with have at least one or two responsibilities they absolutely need to show up for more than their exercise most of the time, and several things that are of similar importance to their exercise. Not that they’re mutually exclusive. In some ways the multitudes can even enhance one another. Food tastes better after a good workout. A workout feels better well-fueled. Stresses can seem more manageable when exercise fulfills a sense of nourishment to your well-being and soul.
That being said, I hope your health and the exercise routine that contributes to it is up there as one of your higher priorities, or is in the process of becoming one. There may at times be the opposite kind of work to reduce other stressors such that you have enough time and energy to eventually meet the 150 minutes per week goal. It’s not easy to do it at first!
There is also no lower limit or threshold for it to be beneficial for your health. 150 minutes is easy to remember, but a somewhat arbitrary number. If you are new to exercise, or are someone that has hard feelings when you don’t achieve a goal right away, I recommend starting with something like 30-60 minutes per week, and seeing how that goes for you, and adding incrementally once you see that you are consistently reaching it and feeling ok. If you have a rough week of stress, try to speak kindly to yourself as you find your own moving definition of enough in the ever changing context of your life. Just keep going.
There appears to be a dose-dependent but non-linear relationship between the number of minutes and longevity, meaning every little bit helps, but those first 60 minutes are going to do a bit more for you than the next 60, and so on.
For the cardio type, you can do any type of sustainable activity, such as walking or jogging, biking, swimming, dancing, skiing, water walking, elliptical, rowing, stairmaster, jump rope, et cetera. It needs to produce a moderate heart and respiration rate for the duration, which I’ll define more clearly in the next post.
It does not need to be high intensity, nor include interval training, nor burpees. You can do those things if you like, but they’re not essential. This is a case where simplest is really best, especially at the start where just getting used to one activity will be enough. I think it is important for each individual to reflect on what activity they really enjoy doing rather than what they might have been taught “counts” as exercise. Remember, this is an activity or set of activities that is meant to be part of a lifetime sustainable routine.
Some mixed modal conditioning AKA CrossFit metcon is ok if you really enjoy that type of cardio, find it sustainable, and can manage to keep the effort moderate – meaning average heart rate not too high or too low – but that can be tricky to do depending on the format and exercise selection, and being aware that longer workouts using weights tend to generate more muscular fatigue and soreness than traditional cardio exercises. For the most part I find it impractical and requires too much thinking, even though for many years it was my primary type of cardio. I still do it occasionally, because being impractical and unstructured sometimes is also a part of following my joy.
Some combination of activity types over the course of the week can be a nice, balanced way to approach it, or you can keep it simple and stick to the one activity you enjoy the most. I encourage you to start with the easy button, and follow your joy.
What does moderate intensity and vigorous intensity mean? I’ll talk about that in the next post.
Mauricio
References:
The Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. PMID: 30418471
World Health Organization 2020 guidelines on physical activity and sedentary behaviour. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33239350/
WHO Guidelines on Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2020. EXECUTIVE SUMMARY. Available from: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK566048