3 ms·

How Little Exercise Can You Get Away With?

50 points by robg 17y ago

petercooper 17y ago
20 minutes per week for reasonable mental health? Looks like I need to pick up my pace a little.. :-)
bootload 17y ago
"... You do not necessarily have to divide your exercise time into daily allotments, either. Existing “scientific evidence does not allow researchers to say, for example, whether the health benefits of 30 minutes on five days a week are any different from the health benefits of 50 minutes on three days a week,” according to the activity guidelines. Do what suits your schedule. ..." Minimum for mental health, not physical health and doesn't take into account is the way people work very well. If you do lots of little bits of "regular" exercise it adds up. Leave a time interval and it "appears" to get harder to do the next time. I found this last year trying to see exactly why it's easy to fail doing hard things. By breaking the hard thing into little irregular steps and repeat them at fixed regular intervals there is less chance of failure. The fail point is right around the time you start to do a hard task after an idle period. Take a break and things appear harder than they are. The amount of motivation energy is high. Do things regularly and the energy barrier seems lower. I found this out the hard way trying to see how far I could push myself without cracking or failing. My target last year was 1000 miles.
jrp 17y ago
More about METs and tradeoffs between minutes exercised and intensity of exercise: http://www.health.gov/paguidelines/guidelines/Appendix1.aspx http://www.health.gov/paguidelines/guidelines/Appendix1.aspx
keefe 17y ago
Title is a bit misleading - sure 20 min a day may be fine for achieving some milestone, but the bottom line is that our bodies are machines that are not meant to be sedentary!!! at the very least, 1 lb of fat = 3200 calories and we should not be walking around with whole people of fat tied to our guts
Daniel_Newby 17y ago
Causality FAIL. They even have the unmitigated gall to talk about a "dose-response" relationship for what is a purely observational study.

50 points by robg 17y ago

20 minutes per week for reasonable mental health? Looks like I need to pick up my pace a little.. :-)

"... You do not necessarily have to divide your exercise time into daily allotments, either. Existing “scientific evidence does not allow researchers to say, for example, whether the health benefits of 30 minutes on five days a week are any different from the health benefits of 50 minutes on three days a week,” according to the activity guidelines. Do what suits your schedule. ..." Minimum for mental health, not physical health and doesn't take into account is the way people work very well. If you do lots of little bits of "regular" exercise it adds up. Leave a time interval and it "appears" to get harder to do the next time. I found this last year trying to see exactly why it's easy to fail doing hard things. By breaking the hard thing into little irregular steps and repeat them at fixed regular intervals there is less chance of failure. The fail point is right around the time you start to do a hard task after an idle period. Take a break and things appear harder than they are. The amount of motivation energy is high. Do things regularly and the energy barrier seems lower. I found this out the hard way trying to see how far I could push myself without cracking or failing. My target last year was 1000 miles.

jrp 17y ago

More about METs and tradeoffs between minutes exercised and intensity of exercise: http://www.health.gov/paguidelines/guidelines/Appendix1.aspx http://www.health.gov/paguidelines/guidelines/Appendix1.aspx

keefe 17y ago

Title is a bit misleading - sure 20 min a day may be fine for achieving some milestone, but the bottom line is that our bodies are machines that are not meant to be sedentary!!! at the very least, 1 lb of fat = 3200 calories and we should not be walking around with whole people of fat tied to our guts

Daniel_Newby 17y ago

Causality FAIL. They even have the unmitigated gall to talk about a "dose-response" relationship for what is a purely observational study.