One of the most pressing questions for anyone interested in the relationship between exercise and living longer is how much physical activity do we really need to stay healthy.
Is 30 minutes a day enough? Can we live with less? Do we all have to exercise in one session, or can we spread it out throughout the day? And when we talk regarding exercise, Does it have to be hard to count?
For years, exercise scientists have tried to quantify the ideal “dose” of exercise for most people. They finally reached broad consensus in 2008 with the Physical Activity Guidelines for North Americans, which were updated in 2018 following a comprehensive review of the science on movement, sitting and health. In both versions, guidelines advise that any healthy person should rack up 150 minutes of moderate exercise each weekand half if it is intense.
But what is the best way to space out those weekly minutes? And what does “moderate” mean? Here’s what some of the leading experts had to say regarding step counting, stairs, weekend warriors, increased longevity, and why the healthiest step we can take is the one that gets us off the couch.
Aim for 150 minutes
“for longevity, 150 minutes a week of moderate to high intensity physical activity is clearly enoughsaid Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of epidemiology at the Harvard TH Chan School of Public Health, who has studied movement and health extensively and helped write the current national physical activity guidelines.
For practical purposes, exercise scientists often recommend dividing that 150 minutes into 30-minute bouts of brisk walking or a similar activity five times a week. “It is quite clear from numerous well-conducted large-scale epidemiological studies that 30 minutes of moderate-intensity activity on most days reduces the risk of premature death and many diseases, including stroke, heart attack, type 2 diabetes, and many types of cancersaid Ulf Ekelund, a specialist professor in the epidemiology of physical activity at the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences in Oslo, who has led many of those studies.
For the professor, moderate exercise means: “activities that increase breathing and heart rateso the effort feels like a five or six on a scale of one to 10.” In other words, pick up the pace a bit if walking is your inclination, but don’t feel compelled to run..
Consider exercise snacks
You can also break your workout into even smaller segments. “It doesn’t matter if exercise is done in one long, continuous 30-minute session or spread out throughout the day in shorter sessions,” said Emmanuel Stamatakis, an exercise scientist at the University of Sydney in Australia who studies physical activity. and health.
He says recent studies overwhelmingly show that we can rack up our weekly 150 minutes of moderate exercise in whatever way works best for us. “Many people may find it easier and more sustainable to take a few dozen one- or two-minute walks between work tasks or other commitments. There is no special magic in a sustained 30-minute exercise session to reap the most health benefits,” she clarifies.
And he suggests thinking of these bite-sized workouts as exercise snacks. “Activities like brisk walking, stair climbing, and carrying shopping bags provide great opportunities for motion snacks”. To concentrate the health benefits of these training nuggets, he suggests keeping the intensity relatively high, so that the person feels a little out of breath.
You can also concentrate all your exercise on long workouts on Saturday and Sunday.
In a 2017 study by Dr. Stamatakis and colleagues, people who reported exercising almost entirely on weekends were less likely to die prematurely than those who said they rarely exercised. But being a weekend warrior has drawbacks. “It’s certainly not ideal to spend the work week totally sedentary and then try to compensate” over the weekend, Dr. Stamatakis said. Many of the health benefits of regular exercise, such as better blood sugar control and improved mood, are lost on days you don’t exercise, he said. In addition, it increases the risk of exercise-related injuries.
count your steps
Exercise recommendations remain the same if exercise is measured in steps instead of minutes. For most people, “150 minutes of exercise a week would translate to around 7,000 to 8,000 steps a day”said Dr. Lee. In a new large-scale study by Dr. Lee and Dr. Ekelund on the relationship between steps and longevity, published in March in The Lancet, the optimal step count for people under the age of 60 years was regarding 8,000 to 10,000 per dayand for those 60 and over, it was around 6,000 to 8,000 a day.
Of course, these step and minute recommendations focus on health and life expectancy, not physical performance. “If you want to run a marathon or 10K as fast as possible, you need a lot more exercise“said Dr. Ekelund.
The recommended 150 minutes a week may also be too few to prevent weight gain with age. In a 2010 study of nearly 35,000 women led by Dr. Lee, only those who walked or moderately exercised for regarding an hour a day during middle age maintained their weight as they aged.
So, if you have the time and inclination, move more than 30 minutes a daysaid Dr. Lee and the other scientists. Usually, the more active we are, beyond 30 minutes a day, the more our risks of chronic diseases decrease and the longer our lives can be.
But any activity is better than none. “Every minute counts,” said Dr. Ekelund. “Climbing the stairs has health benefits, even if it only lasts a minute or two, if you repeat it regularly,” concluded
