> Those adults who met the 150 minute a week guideline on exercise experienced a modest 8-9% reduction in cardiovascular risk, the study found. This was consistent across all levels of fitness.
> In order to achieve substantial protection, classed as a greater than 30% risk reduction, between 560 and 610 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a week was needed.
So 30 minutes a day is still good, but more is better. Seems reasonable.
Also exercise doesn't mean planned / scheduled exercise, like going to the gym. Daily activities can count, like cycling to the train station for example. Which gets to one of my favorite hobby horses: increasing exercise at the population level is an urban design problem.
Urban design can help, but only for those who actually want to take the 'hard' route. Most people I know would rather take a subway or call an uber for anything above 20 minutes of walking (which makes me sad).
Walking to subway station and from destination subway station to final destination is significantly more walking time than using a car from home to final destination.
i think that's a chicken and egg cultural problem. build cities in a way where bicycles/walking is encouraged, then over time you'll have people that want to do exactly that.
I used to live in a very walkable part of Victoria BC, which was great! Unfortunately I was eventually priced out, and the job market there was very competitive so I had to move
I wound up in a fairly walkable part of Calgary. But Calgary is not a super walkable or bikeable city. Transit here is at best ok, and winter gets very cold. There are some good bike paths but you have to be pretty determined to use them when it snows or it's -40 out.
I guess what I'm saying is urban design is super important, but geography has a say too. We don't all get to live in the relatively mild west coast weather.
Calgary could be much better, but the river pathway is really good. It doesn't snow that much and it is rarely -40 (as in pretty much never unless you go in for wind chill). They do a very good job of clearing snow from the core pathways; way better than they do the roads! I think the biggest challenges are that it's likely the non-car options are all managed by car driving bureaucrats. Things like commuter pathways that just end in construction, with convoluted or no detours; slow & widespread construction that seems to be focused on pretty landscaping vs. functional infrastructure; what it's like to ride a bike or scooter in close proximity to big volumes of massive trucks. This is not unique to Calgary, but if we made city managers walk, roll or bus to work for a month it would help IMO.
The trick is to make the healthy option the easy route. That's what Paris did (creating more bike lanes, getting rid of parking spots, closing roads to cars) and cycling is now more popular than driving [1].
Indeed after the pandemic many more bike, for what I've seen a considerable percentage e-bikes, maybe understandably given the hills and distances in Paris, but imho not the everyday cardio exercise one needs.
I got a group of 5 or so friends looking at me like I just came out of a spaceship when I told them me and my wife go for walks almost every evening for 30-60 min... walking for the sake of walking was truly alien to them.
example: Calgary is currently debating removal of the free fare zone for the DT transit line. It's like 10 blocks of straight, flat walking but you hear things like "nobody will go out for lunch and support downtown businesses if we get ride of this!" Currently it's mostly used by homeless people to stay warm in the winter.
At certain times of day the London underground deliberately directs people to longer paths around the stations to alleviate congestion. This kind of thing could be a health benefit.
9 hours of moderate to vigorous seems like a lot.
When I do vigorous (2 times a week HIIT) I cannot do vigorous the next day, my body clearly needs recovery. I can do moderate.
But I wonder what scientists mean by vigorous at this point. I am starting to suspect I set the bar too high
I think the definition of vigorous is roughly 75% of max heart rate. HIIT would generally be more strenuous than that. Roughly speaking for a lot of people, running faster than about a 10:00/mi pace is probably vigorous.
In the WHO recommendations, they say to get 75 minutes of vigorous or 150 of moderate per week. I believe in this study they use the same double counting of vigorous minutes.
I’ve seen other studies that say you get most all of the cardio benefit you can with about 150m vigorous/300m moderate. You could roughly get that by running about 2.5 miles per day.
I may be misunderstanding how the study was conducted, but it sounds like a more reasonable conclusion to draw from the study is that those who tend to have better health outcomes and longer healthspans/lifespans are the ones who also are willing to prioritize their health and physical fitness and are willing to spend this much time on exercise.
The average age of participants in the study was 57, so you're already narrowing in on a very specific and pretty narrow subset of the population when you're looking at seniors who are also spending 10 hours a week on exercise.
While 560-610 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity certainly helps, I'd think these are individuals who are generally abstaining from smoking, will try to eat healthy at least moderately often, stay away from overconsumption of fast food or alcohol, etc.
Basically, it sounds like there is a degree of correlation here between habits and outcomes that is being conflated with causation.
Confounders are included and therefore controlled for, and causality can be assumed since the DV is an event/hazard. This is also the reason you end up with the seemingly high average...
10h/week of moderate exercise should be straight forward. moderate exercise includes stuff like cleaning and other chores, playing with your kids, walking to the corner store, et cetera.
The study specifically includes walking in their list of exercises. You probably do want a mix of exercises -- 90 minutes of vigorous exercise a week is a standard recommendation, but 10h a week of vigorous exercise is probably contraindicated for the average 57 year old in the study.
Walking is good exercise for anybody who is out of shape.
I don't think 10 hours per week is unreasonable or impossible. And I don't see why you need to be a hypochondriac or narcissist to prioritize physical activities. The article does not define the required level of exertion, but I assume things like biking, ping-pong/pickleball, soccer, etc all count. A lot of physical activity can be cheap, though it is more challenging in the winter.
Up and down your stairs at home, walking to shops or work, or dedicated gym / biking / walk time before bed is basically it. If you have a tight schedule that can be very hard and if you live in the wrong type of housing it's also harder unfortunately
It's lower than it sounds: this time includes even relatively gentle exercise (a brisk walk) and although it's not explicit here most other uses of similar metrics I've seen generally count hard cardio minutes as 2x, e.g. the NHS guidelines (https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/physical-activity-guid...) this references are 150 mins moderate exercise or 75 mins vigorous.
Two hours of cardio into your daily routine is ~40% higher than the upper bound suggested by the article.
A lot of people can get this level of exercise by walking or cycling to work. Even for those people that can’t, it’s something to consider the next time you are changing jobs or moving house.
That's like 90 minutes of exercise a day if you take zero rest days... Not happening for most people. I think even marathon training requires less than 90 minutes a day on average.
A lot of this sounds very different than other studies that have said small amounts of exercise have substantial benefits.
I was always a little suspicious when they would say that you only need moderate exercise like walking because when you do vigorous exercise your blood vessels expand up to 3x diameter, keeping your arteries supple and elastic. You just don't get that by walking.
This is a change from the prior roughly 150 minutes and looks to scale depending upon the subject's starting fitness - higher fitness can get by with less, lower fitness needs to hit the higher duration numbers.
So this study was on adults aged 40-69, over 8 years or so. And then they had 500k possible people, of which 200k or so had accelerometer data, and then 17k or so of those actually had done a vo2max test, which they admit might select for a slightly healthier population. I don't know if you can say much if anything close to the headline from looking at this data.
I guess the one interesting thing is that they only had accelerometer data, so i guess maybe this wouldnt undercount activity minutes the way my garmin does (i can do a lot before i cross 100bpm or whatever the threshold is).
It seems like a lot here depends on how you try to measure this activity. Garmin uses the hr mostly i think so basically most of my stepcount is ignored. Pure accelerometer data underrepresents resistance training and overrepresents relatively low energy fidgeting.
I feel like this is a garbage study tbh. Or a mid study with a garbage headline slapped on it.
wow, that's a lot of time... I wonder if we can offset that time by doing one HIIT exercise a week. there's a group of people trying to crank up SPRINTING-SATURDAYS as a thing on youtube (sprintingproject). I like the idea because the body has 6 days to recover, there's no way to cause damage with 6 day recovery.
It makes me feel better about my cycling addiction. Although I wonder how healthy ultra distances are (cycling all day, which I frequently do on at least 1 day of the weekend)
Important point is that study was done on participants with average age of 57. And by "substantial" benefit they mean reduction in cardiovascular events by 30% compared to around 10% for people who do 150 minutes of exercise a week.
I wonder if healthy diet also plays role in the outcome.
Without a control group, correlation is not causation. So the opening sentence is misleading, exaggerated, or maybe even plain false:
> Adults should aim to do between 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity to achieve a substantial reduction in the risk of heart attacks and stroke, suggest the findings of an observational study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
It is highly likely that healthier people exercise more (and the bedridden exercise way less). Also, who exercise more: people who care about their health in general, who don't overwork themselves, who have disposable time and income.
For example, an older person's walking pace is strongly correlated with their remaining life years. If we force these people to walk faster, they won't outrun death - we would very likely just increase their mortality.
There are multiple comprehensive umbrella reviews on the subject. Synthesis of knowledge synthesis. Tens of thousands of study subjects over decades and decades.
15 MET hours above 3 METs gain 70% of the possible benefits from cardio.
Not exactly contradictory results, but it makes this sound like bullshit.
The headline relies entirely on the definition of "substantial". Anyway, the statistics and logic of the paper appear sound at first reading, but I'm interested in why they censored participants with cycling VO2(max) over 55 as "implausible".
Well, on second thought, a potential flaw of this analysis is that calculating MVPA from medical accelerometer data has a huge blind spot. Bicycling is invisible to those devices, as is any other activity that doesn't move your wrist, like leg presses.
I think this would be tough for a lot of people ... that's 10 hours of exercise. I walk 5+ miles a day which takes me roughly an hour and a half. I'm only getting five to 7 hours.. Not sure I have the time in the day to add another three.
I wonder why this gets downvoted. Nowadays people are aware of what they sacrifice economically and physically when they have kids. It changes the incentives.
It's difficult but where there's a will there's a way. I know plenty of parents who find time to get exercise in. And even if you don't hit ~600 minutes in a week, any amount of exercise is beneficial.
Go for a run pushing your kids in the stroller (even more cardiovascular benefit than just running by itself tbh). Do a bunch of squats at home while cradling your toddler (it becomes funtime for them, like they're on a mini rollercoaster ride). Take your kids for a hike, whether they're tiny and need to be brought along in a baby carrier or they can walk by themselves.
Basically, you can make it happen if you really want it to happen.
Side benefit: Your kids grow up seeing you build habits that keep you healthy long-term. Eventually, they get involved and that helps them learn self-care skills.
Plus, going for a walk/run in the stroller with Dad has to be developmentally healthier than staring at a tablet on the couch.
I frequently see couples who have a baby buggy with big wheels that allows jogging. Or a trailer for the bike. Or a backpack where you can put a baby on top.
"Moderate exercise" is not a very high bar. Chores and playing with your kids probably count. There's a good chance you're already getting the required amount.
I have two kids and recently I started cycling to work. I can get maybe half the new recommended number on a good week. That apparently translates to a 20% reduction.
Upon reading the article:
> The average age was 57 years and 56% were female and 96% were white.
My take is that all this study says is that's kind of late to try to tackle this problem in one's 50s. That being said it's nice to know that I could maybe get a 30% reduction if I were to start spitting my lungs out at this age doing 10h of intense cardio.
> Cool, now combine this with being a parent of young kids in a 2-income family without any other assistance.
For anyone literally in this situation: start small and consistent. Your goal is not to pencil in 10 hours a week of cardio. Instead, try to do 30 seconds of the same calisthenics exercise with your child before work/school consistently for 6 months. Perhaps pushups.
Over time you'll find the 30 seconds grows because you want it to. You might learn that warming up with jumping jacks helps you do pushups more comfortably. You might watch videos with your child about pushup variations and incorporate them into your routine together. Perhaps invest a few $$ into small equipment to support activities you're already doing, like pushup handles. Or maybe an over-the-door pullup bar.
Your routine won't be "optimal" in the 600 minutes sense, but a suboptimal routine that you do consistently is infinitely better for you than an ideal routine you don't, and it can expand/contract based on your needs.
I don't know... If you're actually exercising an hour and a half each day, every day, you're going to be incurring some pretty regular exercise related injuries and degeneration. Your heart might like all that running, but your knees are going to make you regret it.
Running is not the only form of exercise. There are plenty of low impact forms of exercise out there that can get you into any zone of cardio you want.
Nowadays exercising might mean walk at decent pace. People acts like they are asking you to run 90 minutes daily at marathon record pace, when they are actually saying to walk briskly for trips less than a mile, or take the stairs instead of the elevator.
Only a few people take benefit from running heavier than 5 km (3 miles) in 30 minutes every other day. The rest of you exercise should come from anything that is not driving or browsing the web.
> If you're actually exercising an hour and a half each day, every day, you're going to be incurring some pretty regular exercise related injuries and degeneration
The human body evolved for that, and much more, you're not training 90 min per day at athlete level performance, you'll be fine... Of course if you run 10 hours per week with bad technique you're going to fuck your shit up, but you can easily alternate 60 min of gym/cardio every day with very little chance of injuries + an evening 30min "brisk" walk or 30 min of bicycle commute.
It's your body, do as you want, but chances are you exercise (way) too little, not too much
So do an exercise that you actually enjoy and want to be doing.
I play pickleball 10h a week and absolutely love the time spent playing. So there is no wasted time here. I spend all my exercise time doing something fun that I love doing, and it improves my health outcomes at the same time.
> Those adults who met the 150 minute a week guideline on exercise experienced a modest 8-9% reduction in cardiovascular risk, the study found. This was consistent across all levels of fitness.
> In order to achieve substantial protection, classed as a greater than 30% risk reduction, between 560 and 610 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a week was needed.
So 30 minutes a day is still good, but more is better. Seems reasonable.
Also exercise doesn't mean planned / scheduled exercise, like going to the gym. Daily activities can count, like cycling to the train station for example. Which gets to one of my favorite hobby horses: increasing exercise at the population level is an urban design problem.
Urban design can help, but only for those who actually want to take the 'hard' route. Most people I know would rather take a subway or call an uber for anything above 20 minutes of walking (which makes me sad).
20 minutes of walking is a perfect bicycle distance.
Walking to subway station and from destination subway station to final destination is significantly more walking time than using a car from home to final destination.
i think that's a chicken and egg cultural problem. build cities in a way where bicycles/walking is encouraged, then over time you'll have people that want to do exactly that.
I used to live in a very walkable part of Victoria BC, which was great! Unfortunately I was eventually priced out, and the job market there was very competitive so I had to move
I wound up in a fairly walkable part of Calgary. But Calgary is not a super walkable or bikeable city. Transit here is at best ok, and winter gets very cold. There are some good bike paths but you have to be pretty determined to use them when it snows or it's -40 out.
I guess what I'm saying is urban design is super important, but geography has a say too. We don't all get to live in the relatively mild west coast weather.
Calgary could be much better, but the river pathway is really good. It doesn't snow that much and it is rarely -40 (as in pretty much never unless you go in for wind chill). They do a very good job of clearing snow from the core pathways; way better than they do the roads! I think the biggest challenges are that it's likely the non-car options are all managed by car driving bureaucrats. Things like commuter pathways that just end in construction, with convoluted or no detours; slow & widespread construction that seems to be focused on pretty landscaping vs. functional infrastructure; what it's like to ride a bike or scooter in close proximity to big volumes of massive trucks. This is not unique to Calgary, but if we made city managers walk, roll or bus to work for a month it would help IMO.
> It doesn't snow that much
I'm from Vancouver Island originally so Calgary snows a ton in comparison. :)
You're right it could be worse. It could be better too. That basically describes everywhere though! Overall I do love living here
> if we made city managers walk, roll or bus to work for a month it would help IMO.
Agreed. I think public servants should be encouraged (maybe required?) to dogfood public services now and then
The trick is to make the healthy option the easy route. That's what Paris did (creating more bike lanes, getting rid of parking spots, closing roads to cars) and cycling is now more popular than driving [1].
[1]: See, for example, https://bicyclenetwork.com.au/newsroom/2026/03/11/how-paris-...
Indeed after the pandemic many more bike, for what I've seen a considerable percentage e-bikes, maybe understandably given the hills and distances in Paris, but imho not the everyday cardio exercise one needs.
I got a group of 5 or so friends looking at me like I just came out of a spaceship when I told them me and my wife go for walks almost every evening for 30-60 min... walking for the sake of walking was truly alien to them.
example: Calgary is currently debating removal of the free fare zone for the DT transit line. It's like 10 blocks of straight, flat walking but you hear things like "nobody will go out for lunch and support downtown businesses if we get ride of this!" Currently it's mostly used by homeless people to stay warm in the winter.
At certain times of day the London underground deliberately directs people to longer paths around the stations to alleviate congestion. This kind of thing could be a health benefit.
9 hours of moderate to vigorous seems like a lot. When I do vigorous (2 times a week HIIT) I cannot do vigorous the next day, my body clearly needs recovery. I can do moderate. But I wonder what scientists mean by vigorous at this point. I am starting to suspect I set the bar too high
I think the definition of vigorous is roughly 75% of max heart rate. HIIT would generally be more strenuous than that. Roughly speaking for a lot of people, running faster than about a 10:00/mi pace is probably vigorous.
In the WHO recommendations, they say to get 75 minutes of vigorous or 150 of moderate per week. I believe in this study they use the same double counting of vigorous minutes.
I’ve seen other studies that say you get most all of the cardio benefit you can with about 150m vigorous/300m moderate. You could roughly get that by running about 2.5 miles per day.
I'm not convinced.
I may be misunderstanding how the study was conducted, but it sounds like a more reasonable conclusion to draw from the study is that those who tend to have better health outcomes and longer healthspans/lifespans are the ones who also are willing to prioritize their health and physical fitness and are willing to spend this much time on exercise.
The average age of participants in the study was 57, so you're already narrowing in on a very specific and pretty narrow subset of the population when you're looking at seniors who are also spending 10 hours a week on exercise.
While 560-610 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity certainly helps, I'd think these are individuals who are generally abstaining from smoking, will try to eat healthy at least moderately often, stay away from overconsumption of fast food or alcohol, etc.
Basically, it sounds like there is a degree of correlation here between habits and outcomes that is being conflated with causation.
Confounders are included and therefore controlled for, and causality can be assumed since the DV is an event/hazard. This is also the reason you end up with the seemingly high average...
> Those adults who met the 150 minute a week guideline on exercise experienced a modest 8-9% reduction in cardiovascular risk
30%+ reduction from 10 hours a week of exercise sounds ideal, but 9% isn't nothing.
> 10 hours a week of exercise
Honestly, only a hypochondriac or a narcissist would consider 10h/w acceptable. Everyone is too busy trying to stay alive.
The number only makes sense if you're a body-builder or an influencer who trades on appearance.
Evolution didn't spend millions of years so we could sit 8 hours a day and slouch through the rest.
10h/week of moderate exercise should be straight forward. moderate exercise includes stuff like cleaning and other chores, playing with your kids, walking to the corner store, et cetera.
I don't think those count as "moderate to vigorous" exercise, at least for most of the time you're doing any of them.
Consider the speed/vigor with which one does something, whatever it might be. It can be quite the range.
The study specifically includes walking in their list of exercises. You probably do want a mix of exercises -- 90 minutes of vigorous exercise a week is a standard recommendation, but 10h a week of vigorous exercise is probably contraindicated for the average 57 year old in the study.
Walking is good exercise for anybody who is out of shape.
Walking as moderate exercise is not "just walking" though. You need sustained speed
I don't think 10 hours per week is unreasonable or impossible. And I don't see why you need to be a hypochondriac or narcissist to prioritize physical activities. The article does not define the required level of exertion, but I assume things like biking, ping-pong/pickleball, soccer, etc all count. A lot of physical activity can be cheap, though it is more challenging in the winter.
Luckily because of the AI we'll all be able to do more in less time, so those 10 hours will be easy to find.
Jokes aside, 10 hours a week is quite something. Good that they mention that 2-3 hours is also already beneficial.
I’m honestly struggling to figure out how I would fit 2 hours of cardio into my daily routine.
Up and down your stairs at home, walking to shops or work, or dedicated gym / biking / walk time before bed is basically it. If you have a tight schedule that can be very hard and if you live in the wrong type of housing it's also harder unfortunately
It's lower than it sounds: this time includes even relatively gentle exercise (a brisk walk) and although it's not explicit here most other uses of similar metrics I've seen generally count hard cardio minutes as 2x, e.g. the NHS guidelines (https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/physical-activity-guid...) this references are 150 mins moderate exercise or 75 mins vigorous.
Does lifting weights count as vigorous though? Or strictly cardio?
Because if you need to fit 560 minutes of cardio and then also fit weight lifting 3 times a week that's a lot of time working out
Two hours of cardio into your daily routine is ~40% higher than the upper bound suggested by the article.
A lot of people can get this level of exercise by walking or cycling to work. Even for those people that can’t, it’s something to consider the next time you are changing jobs or moving house.
That's like 90 minutes of exercise a day if you take zero rest days... Not happening for most people. I think even marathon training requires less than 90 minutes a day on average.
Moderate is not vigorous. They mean being active and walking, etc.
The imprecise language in these studies often means people can interpret them in whatever way they want.
This study defines moderate as "brisk" walking, suggesting that it's not just walking.
Athletes live in their own bubble where "vigorous" means "maximal".
A lot of this sounds very different than other studies that have said small amounts of exercise have substantial benefits.
I was always a little suspicious when they would say that you only need moderate exercise like walking because when you do vigorous exercise your blood vessels expand up to 3x diameter, keeping your arteries supple and elastic. You just don't get that by walking.
This study also shows a noticeable benefit from lower exercise levels, just not nearly as much as very high exercise levels.
And many studies that show more exercise volume at high intensity is associated with higher MACE risk.
This is a change from the prior roughly 150 minutes and looks to scale depending upon the subject's starting fitness - higher fitness can get by with less, lower fitness needs to hit the higher duration numbers.
So this study was on adults aged 40-69, over 8 years or so. And then they had 500k possible people, of which 200k or so had accelerometer data, and then 17k or so of those actually had done a vo2max test, which they admit might select for a slightly healthier population. I don't know if you can say much if anything close to the headline from looking at this data.
I guess the one interesting thing is that they only had accelerometer data, so i guess maybe this wouldnt undercount activity minutes the way my garmin does (i can do a lot before i cross 100bpm or whatever the threshold is).
It seems like a lot here depends on how you try to measure this activity. Garmin uses the hr mostly i think so basically most of my stepcount is ignored. Pure accelerometer data underrepresents resistance training and overrepresents relatively low energy fidgeting.
I feel like this is a garbage study tbh. Or a mid study with a garbage headline slapped on it.
wow, that's a lot of time... I wonder if we can offset that time by doing one HIIT exercise a week. there's a group of people trying to crank up SPRINTING-SATURDAYS as a thing on youtube (sprintingproject). I like the idea because the body has 6 days to recover, there's no way to cause damage with 6 day recovery.
It makes me feel better about my cycling addiction. Although I wonder how healthy ultra distances are (cycling all day, which I frequently do on at least 1 day of the weekend)
Dubious.
Combined with retatrutide or other GLP-1 agonist peptides and that number is probably significantly smaller.
Important point is that study was done on participants with average age of 57. And by "substantial" benefit they mean reduction in cardiovascular events by 30% compared to around 10% for people who do 150 minutes of exercise a week.
I wonder if healthy diet also plays role in the outcome.
9-10 hours seems like a lot. That's very discouraging.
Without a control group, correlation is not causation. So the opening sentence is misleading, exaggerated, or maybe even plain false:
> Adults should aim to do between 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity to achieve a substantial reduction in the risk of heart attacks and stroke, suggest the findings of an observational study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
It is highly likely that healthier people exercise more (and the bedridden exercise way less). Also, who exercise more: people who care about their health in general, who don't overwork themselves, who have disposable time and income.
For example, an older person's walking pace is strongly correlated with their remaining life years. If we force these people to walk faster, they won't outrun death - we would very likely just increase their mortality.
There are multiple comprehensive umbrella reviews on the subject. Synthesis of knowledge synthesis. Tens of thousands of study subjects over decades and decades.
15 MET hours above 3 METs gain 70% of the possible benefits from cardio.
Not exactly contradictory results, but it makes this sound like bullshit.
What’s a MET hour?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_equivalent_of_task
MET is a measure of cardio exertion.
Walking briskly is 3. Moderate running is 6. These are just examples.
An hour spent at 3 MET is 3 MET hours.
How wealthy are those who have time to spend 10 hours on exercise?
The headline relies entirely on the definition of "substantial". Anyway, the statistics and logic of the paper appear sound at first reading, but I'm interested in why they censored participants with cycling VO2(max) over 55 as "implausible".
Well, on second thought, a potential flaw of this analysis is that calculating MVPA from medical accelerometer data has a huge blind spot. Bicycling is invisible to those devices, as is any other activity that doesn't move your wrist, like leg presses.
> Adults should aim to do between 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity
> Observational study
Can we stop doing this please?
I think this would be tough for a lot of people ... that's 10 hours of exercise. I walk 5+ miles a day which takes me roughly an hour and a half. I'm only getting five to 7 hours.. Not sure I have the time in the day to add another three.
that's assuming you are walking at a fairly brisk pace.. the article says
> 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity
Cool, now combine this with being a parent of young kids in a 2-income family without any other assistance.
I wonder why this gets downvoted. Nowadays people are aware of what they sacrifice economically and physically when they have kids. It changes the incentives.
People choose between staying physically fit or have kids? I find that hard to believe.
It's difficult but where there's a will there's a way. I know plenty of parents who find time to get exercise in. And even if you don't hit ~600 minutes in a week, any amount of exercise is beneficial.
Go for a run pushing your kids in the stroller (even more cardiovascular benefit than just running by itself tbh). Do a bunch of squats at home while cradling your toddler (it becomes funtime for them, like they're on a mini rollercoaster ride). Take your kids for a hike, whether they're tiny and need to be brought along in a baby carrier or they can walk by themselves.
Basically, you can make it happen if you really want it to happen.
Side benefit: Your kids grow up seeing you build habits that keep you healthy long-term. Eventually, they get involved and that helps them learn self-care skills.
Plus, going for a walk/run in the stroller with Dad has to be developmentally healthier than staring at a tablet on the couch.
I frequently see couples who have a baby buggy with big wheels that allows jogging. Or a trailer for the bike. Or a backpack where you can put a baby on top.
It's even easier with young kids, you just play with them. Once they get older and too cool it becomes a pain.
"Moderate exercise" is not a very high bar. Chores and playing with your kids probably count. There's a good chance you're already getting the required amount.
I have two kids and recently I started cycling to work. I can get maybe half the new recommended number on a good week. That apparently translates to a 20% reduction.
Upon reading the article:
> The average age was 57 years and 56% were female and 96% were white.
My take is that all this study says is that's kind of late to try to tackle this problem in one's 50s. That being said it's nice to know that I could maybe get a 30% reduction if I were to start spitting my lungs out at this age doing 10h of intense cardio.
> Cool, now combine this with being a parent of young kids in a 2-income family without any other assistance.
For anyone literally in this situation: start small and consistent. Your goal is not to pencil in 10 hours a week of cardio. Instead, try to do 30 seconds of the same calisthenics exercise with your child before work/school consistently for 6 months. Perhaps pushups.
Over time you'll find the 30 seconds grows because you want it to. You might learn that warming up with jumping jacks helps you do pushups more comfortably. You might watch videos with your child about pushup variations and incorporate them into your routine together. Perhaps invest a few $$ into small equipment to support activities you're already doing, like pushup handles. Or maybe an over-the-door pullup bar.
Your routine won't be "optimal" in the 600 minutes sense, but a suboptimal routine that you do consistently is infinitely better for you than an ideal routine you don't, and it can expand/contract based on your needs.
At this rate you get more lifespan not exercising. 10h a week out of your waking time is about 9%. No way your heart health gonna give you that much.
Lifespan != healthspan
I don't know... If you're actually exercising an hour and a half each day, every day, you're going to be incurring some pretty regular exercise related injuries and degeneration. Your heart might like all that running, but your knees are going to make you regret it.
The knees need exercise to be well. Nutrients are passed into meniscus etc by pressure cycling.
Running is not the only form of exercise. There are plenty of low impact forms of exercise out there that can get you into any zone of cardio you want.
Nowadays exercising might mean walk at decent pace. People acts like they are asking you to run 90 minutes daily at marathon record pace, when they are actually saying to walk briskly for trips less than a mile, or take the stairs instead of the elevator.
Only a few people take benefit from running heavier than 5 km (3 miles) in 30 minutes every other day. The rest of you exercise should come from anything that is not driving or browsing the web.
> If you're actually exercising an hour and a half each day, every day, you're going to be incurring some pretty regular exercise related injuries and degeneration
The human body evolved for that, and much more, you're not training 90 min per day at athlete level performance, you'll be fine... Of course if you run 10 hours per week with bad technique you're going to fuck your shit up, but you can easily alternate 60 min of gym/cardio every day with very little chance of injuries + an evening 30min "brisk" walk or 30 min of bicycle commute.
It's your body, do as you want, but chances are you exercise (way) too little, not too much
> The human body evolved for that, and much more
This is questionable past the median age that humans had on evolutionary scale.
Not questionable at all, we're made to stand up and walk/run, quite literally. We certainly did not evolve to sit 10+ hours a day
https://www.ucdavis.edu/blog/humans-are-born-run
https://www.kpax.com/news/a-wilder-view/a-wilder-view-why-hu...
None of these address the age bit.
The joke is that jogging will add years to your life, but you'll have spent those years jogging.
Heart health isn't the only mechanism by which exercise could affect mortality.
So do an exercise that you actually enjoy and want to be doing.
I play pickleball 10h a week and absolutely love the time spent playing. So there is no wasted time here. I spend all my exercise time doing something fun that I love doing, and it improves my health outcomes at the same time.