It all depends on whether you want to lose weight, increase your endurance, or achieve other fitness goals. Here are some exercise tips and how often you should exercise.
Before deciding how much exercise you need, it’s good to know what your exercise goals are in the first place.
How much exercise is enough? It depends on your health and your goals.
First ask yourself: how much exercise is enough for what? He explains that before you make a decision on how much exercise you need, you need to have a good idea of your exercise goal(s): Do you exercise for your fitness, to control your weight or to keep your stress levels low?
For general health benefits, a daily walking routine may be sufficient. If your goal is more specific, such as lowering your blood pressure, improving your cardiovascular fitness, or losing weight, you will need to exercise more frequently or more intensely. The medical literature continues to support the idea that exercise is medicine. Regular exercise can help reduce the risk of premature death, control your blood pressure, reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, fight obesity, improve your lung function and help treat depression.
Fitness for adults and children
Adults should aim for 150 to 300 minutes of moderate physical activity or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity each week for good health. When done regularly, aerobic activity improves cardiorespiratory fitness. Running, brisk walking, swimming, and cycling are all forms of aerobic activity.
Additionally, specialists encourage balance and stretching activities to improve flexibility, as well as muscle-strengthening exercises twice a week or more. Older people should focus more on balance exercises, such as tai chi, which have been shown to improve stability and decrease fracture risk in older people, according to a review published in December 2013 in the European Journal of Integrative Medicine, and continue to do as much aerobic and muscle-strengthening activity as their body can handle.
Any time or any form of exercise is better than no exercise, be it 1, 5 or 30 minutes. For preschoolers, it is better to spend more time playing to promote their growth and development. This includes a mix of active and unstructured play, such as biking, jumping, or swimming. Children and teens ages 6 to 17 should get one hour of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity a day. The majority of those 60 minutes should be spent in aerobic activity, which is activity that involves the repetitive use of large muscles and that increases heart rate and breathing. Children and teens should do muscle- and bone-strengthening activities, such as jumping or exercises that use body weight as resistance, three times a week.
How much exercise do you need to lose weight or maintain weight loss?
Research consistently shows that building exercise into your routine is helpful in losing weight. For example, in a study published in August 2012 in the journal Obesity, women who both dieted and exercised lost more weight than those who dieted alone. However, if you’re trying to control your weight through exercise, you’ll probably need to devote a little more time to exercise. This is because 150-250 minutes per week of moderate-intensity physical activity yields only modest weight loss results, and to lose a significant amount of weight, you may need to do some intensity exercise. moderate for more than 250 minutes per week (in addition to dietary intervention). So how much exercise do you need in a day? That equates to about an hour, five days a week.
People looking to lose a significant amount of weight, more than 5% of their body weight, should get more than 300 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week to achieve their goals.
If you increase the intensity of your activity, you can achieve similar weight control benefits in half the time. For example, in a January 2017 study published in the Journal of Diabetes Research, women who performed high-intensity interval exercise lost the same amount of weight and body fat as those who performed moderate-intensity cardio. , but they did it with much less practice.
It’s important to remember that once you’ve reached your weight loss goals, you need to keep exercising to make sure you don’t regain the lost weight. A study published in August 2014 in the Journal of Primary Prevention, which analyzed data from 81 studies investigating the role of exercise in weight management, found that one of the biggest ways exercise helps to weight management is to prevent weight gain (perhaps even more than it helps you lose weight).
Although 250 minutes of exercise per week can prevent weight regain, some people need more physical activity than others to maintain a healthy weight, to lose weight, or to prevent weight gain once they lost some.
To lose weight and prevent weight regain, practice resistance exercises to increase the level of fat-free mass in the body, which improves the metabolic rate. That’s why, when Harvard researchers followed 10,500 men for 12 years, those who did 20 minutes of strength training a day gained less belly fat than those who spent the same amount of time doing cardiovascular exercise, according to data published in the February 2015 issue of the journal Obesity.
How much exercise do you need to improve your cardiovascular health?
Fortunately for anyone trying to improve their heart health, a little exercise isn’t enough. For overall cardiovascular health, engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week or at least 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity per week. Other research shows that aerobic exercise is the most effective form of exercise for improving measures of cardiometabolic health, including insulin sensitivity, glucose tolerance, and blood pressure. Do muscle-strengthening activities at least two days a week to help preserve and build lean muscle.
Before engaging in high-intensity exercise, especially if you have a history of heart disease, it’s important to ask your doctor what exercise intensity is safe for you. And, again, remember that it’s okay to work until you reach your target exercise level. Whatever your goals, a little exercise will always be more beneficial than none. Small steps sometimes get the best results.