The Recommended Amount Of Exercise Per Week
The negative effects of a sedentary lifestyle include an increased risk of type II diabetes, cancer, stroke, and cardiovascular disease, as well as a greater likelihood of premature death. It’s for these reasons that regular exercise is important.
Is it important to you?
The only way to show that exercise is important to you is if you’re getting the recommended amount of exercise per week.
Are you?
Considering that only 1 in 5 adults get enough exercise to maintain good health, the odds are high which camp you belong to.
Falling far short of the bare minimum is not your fault, though. After all, daily exercise calls for a humongous time commitment.
How much of a commitment?
Well, there are only 10,080 minutes in a week and the current exercise guidelines from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) call for 150 of those minutes to be spent performing physical activity at a moderate intensity. That means that roughly 1.5 percent of the week should be spent walking briskly, biking on flat ground, and other shit like that. Yeah, I know, that’s a whopping amount of time that’s supposed to be gobbled up by exercise!
WHOPPING!!!
It’s clear that allotting 1.5 percent of your time to exercise is kind of a ridiculous thing for someone to be expected to do. Like, when breaking the 150 minute recommendation down to 30 minutes of exercise over the course of 5 days, how on earth is anyone to find the time for that, especially when studies show that the average person only has a measly 4.5 hours of free time every day? Fuck, there just isn’t enough time in a day for you to devote a whopping 30 minutes to exercise plus any additional time needed to commute to and from the gym and change in and out of your gear, if necessary. So yeah, if you’re not working out regularly because doing so would eat into waaaaaaayyyyyyyy too much of your time during the week, it’s not your fault!
Given that your extremely busy schedule only affords you 31.5 hours, or 1890 minutes, of free time per week, the current activity guideline that suggests carving out a whopping 150 minutes for exercise is clearly unreasonable. Having possibly recognized this, HHS alternatively recommends 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity exercise throughout the week, with examples including running, biking on hills, and anything else that makes it hard to talk or sing while you’re doing it. That comes out to allocating less than 1 percent of the total minutes in a week to exercise.
Somewhat more manageable, 75 minutes is still a huuuuuuuge chunk of time. Like, seriously, how are you expected to set aside 37 minutes for exercise two times a week? Or 25 minutes three times a week? Or 18 minutes four times a week? Or 15 minutes five times a week? As it was said before, you only have a paltry 4.5 hours of free time on any given day. So with such little time, how the hell are you supposed to squeeze exercise in when there isn’t much opportunity for it?! Having possibly recognized this also, the HHS says that exercise doesn’t have to be done all at once but can take the shape of several mini-workouts that add up. For instance, if you can’t dedicate an entire block of time to working out, you might instead take several 5 or 10 minute intervals throughout the day to take a brisk walk or jog in place. According to research, performing multiple short bursts of activity like that during the day is as effective as one continuous bout of exercise at warding off a number of illnesses and conditions, including premature death.
Now, where the fuck are you supposed to find several small pockets of time throughout the day?
Ha, I’ll be damned if I know!
NOTE: The exercise guidelines here are for aerobic, or cardiovascular, activity that raises the heart rate.1The 150 minute and 75 minute recommendations are the amount of exercise needed for general health. For even more benefits, the guidelines suggest getting 300 minutes a week or more of moderate activity, with that number halving when exercise is performed at a vigorous intensity level. Not only will that doubling of time promote even better health but it’s the bare minimum you may need to exercise to lose weight, keep off lost weight, or meet specific fitness goals. On top of the weekly cardio that’s prescribed for general health, you’re also advised to get at least 2 days of resistance training for the muscles.2 That involves lifting weights, using resistance bands or a suspension trainer, or doing push-ups, burpees, lunges, jumping jacks, air squats, and whatever other bodyweight exercises you can recall doing in gym class as part of the warmup before getting your face reconstructed during an ultraviolent game of dodgeball, or climbing high up a rope with nothing but a thin blue mat underneath to soften the fall, or any number of other dangerous shit that makes you now question what the fuck were adults thinking back then! Some forms of yoga and heavy gardening may also count as muscle-strengthening activities. What the length and intensity for strength training should be, none are specified. Nonetheless, that’s something else that has to be factored into an already unrealistic expectation of how much exercise is expected of you.
Glossary: aerobics, exercise, fitness, gym, intensity, muscle, work out, workout, yoga
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