We all know exercise is crucial for our health. But we’re super busy, so we need to extract the maximum benefit from the exercise we do manage to fit in during the limited time we have. The good news is that emerging research is radically shifting our understanding. We now know we can reap surprisingly large benefits from much smaller amounts of exercise.
So how much exercise do we really need to see significant health impacts? We’ll go through the eye-opening numbers from some recent studies.
Table of Contents
- Raising the stakes
- You Can Consolidate Your Exercise
- Non-Structured Exercise Benefits
- Implications
- Reference List
Raising the stakes
As we age, we begin to lose muscle mass. It starts much earlier than most people think. After age 30, muscle mass decreases from 3-8% per decade. After 60, it accelerates. And this is associated with a host of problems like an increasing risk of falls, rising fat mass, loss of bone density, and insulin resistance [1].
It’s one of the many reasons why exercise is crucial.
You Can Consolidate Your Exercise
But new data is showing us getting enough is easier than we thought. And the first study we’ll look at relates to frequency. How often do we need to exercise to capture its benefits?
The standard recommendation is to get exercise throughout the week. For instance, the National Health Service in the U.K. recommends we “spread exercise evenly over 4 to 5 days a week, or every day” [2]. And when you combine this with the World Health Organization target of 150 to 300 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a week, it’s really tough for many of us to do [3].
Suppose you just aim for the lower target of 150 but try to spread that over 5 days. That’s a half hour of exercise a day. And when we add in things like driving back and forth from the gym and showering afterward, this all adds up to a lot of time. Especially when factoring in work commitments and childcare at home.
So it would be a huge help if we could reduce the number of days we exercise. But would we get the same benefits?
Some earlier studies raised doubts. One analysis looked at a cohort of over 8,000 men. They divided them into groups based on how they exercised. They called one group the weekend warriors: those who crammed all their exercise into 1-2 days. Researchers compared their mortality risk to those who spread their exercise throughout the week. When compared to a group that was sedentary, the weekend warriors had a mortality risk that was 15% lower. But the risk for those who spread out their exercise was a whopping 36% lower [4].
What’s more, when they looked at those men with at least one major risk factor, the difference between the weekend warriors and those not exercising at all disappeared [4].
A more recent, larger cohort study had similar results. It also compared sedentary, weekend warrior, and regularly active groups. Looking at all-cause mortality, the benefits appeared to be less clear for the weekend warrior group [5].
But these earlier studies had a crucial drawback: They relied upon surveys where people reported how much they exercised. This can introduce a lot of inaccuracy into the data.
And that’s why a study published just last month is so groundbreaking. Researchers didn’t rely on questionnaires. Instead, they drew on data from the massive U.K. Biobank cohort. About 90,000 participants in this cohort used a wearable device to measure activity for one week between 2013 and 2015. This study looked at mortality rates for those participants after about 8 years [6].
They divided participants into inactive, weekend warrior, and regularly active groups. The results were a game changer. Compared to the inactive group, the weekend warrior group had an all-cause mortality risk 32% lower over the 8-year timeframe. This was actually better than the regularly active group’s risk reduction of 26% [6].
The numbers showed a similar pattern when it came to deaths from heart disease and cancer. The risk reductions for the weekend warriors were stronger [6].
Researchers found another intriguing result when they examined the data. To identify physically active participants, they relied upon the WHO’s minimum recommendation of 150 minutes a week of moderate physical activity, but also included participants who were a bit below this number, with at least 115 minutes a week.
Surprisingly, the risk reductions were just as strong for those with 115 minutes of activity as for those who hit the 150-minute target [6].
Now, I want to add a caution here in interpreting these results. The weekend warriors didn’t actually cram all their physical activity into just two days. For this study, they were defined as those who got a majority of their exercise in just 1-2 days [6].
But the study does show us something important. If we’re time-pressured, we don’t have to spread our physical activity evenly to gain its benefits. We don’t have to head to the gym five days a week.
Non-Structured Exercise Benefits
This also raises an intriguing question. Researchers found that the benefits were just as strong at 115 minutes a week as at 150. But even that amount can feel like a stretch for many of us. Can we go any lower? The same wearable tech used in this study has revealed shocking evidence for just how low we can go.
In the past, studies generally focused on structured exercise — going for a walk, lifting weights, and so forth. The reason is that we’re much better at accurately recalling our activity when it comes in this form. If I ask you how much exercise you got in the past week, it’s these kinds of activities that will come to mind.
But we often engage in physical activity that isn’t structured in this way. For example, you might go up and down the stairs in your house several times a day. Maybe you recently carried out several heavy boxes to the trash. Or raked up grass clippings in your yard. For me, jumping on the trampoline with my kids is something that I wouldn’t necessarily think to count as exercise. These kinds of activities are hard to accurately recall. So they’ve also been hard to measure and include in studies.
That is, until recently. Wearable motion trackers give us a way to objectively measure these kinds of activities without relying on memory. And that unlocks an entirely new stream of data.
Another group of researchers recently took advantage of this data to make a startling discovery. They were looking at the same U.K. Biobank cohort as the first study we covered. But this time they focused their attention on “nonexercisers.” These were people who reported no leisure-time exercise and no more than one recreational walk per week [7].
Even though they didn’t participate in structured exercise, researchers were curious about their physical activity throughout the week. In particular, they looked for how often they had vigorous activity as they went about daily life. They call this type of activity Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity (VILPA). Then they analyzed how levels of VILPA are associated with all-cause, heart disease, and cancer mortality [7]. This is the kind of exercise that would be invisible to traditional study methods.
Here’s what they discovered. Let’s start with the median number of times a person engaged in VILPA each day. The median was 3 bouts of activity a day lasting 1 to 2 minutes each [7].
Remember, these are nonexercisers. So this is all the vigorous activity they’re getting in a typical week. It amounts to about 6 minutes a day at most, so just 42 minutes a week. What difference did it make? Compared to those with no VILPA, the median frequency of these short bouts was associated with an incredible 38-40% reduction in all-cause and cancer mortality risk, and a 48-49% reduction in heart disease mortality risk [7].
At a minimum total daily time of VILPA of 3.4-4.1 minutes, researchers saw an average mortality risk drop of 22-28% [7].
These risk reductions are comparable to the numbers we saw earlier in the weekend warrior study, where participants were getting at least 115 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week. Is it really possible to get the same benefits in less than half the time?
Here things get a bit tricky. The comparison groups in the two studies aren’t exactly the same. In the weekend warrior study, the inactive group includes everyone getting less than 115 minutes weekly of moderate physical activity. Notice that this would include those getting 42 minutes of VILPA. In contrast, the inactive group in the study on VILPA is getting zero vigorous physical activity. They are truly sedentary.
So since the groups we’re comparing aren’t the same, we can’t directly measure the magnitude of impact.
But there is an important clue in the data suggesting the benefits from these modest amounts of VILPA could be quite similar to those enjoyed by people who hit the WHO targets.
Here’s why: The study showed exercise has a strong dose response that fades the more of it we get. The first chunk of exercise is more beneficial than the second, and the second is more beneficial than the third, and so on, until we reach a point where it makes little difference.
When we go from no bouts of VILPA to 1 bout a day, the mortality risk drops sharply. But by the time we go from 4 to 5, the drop is barely perceptible [7].
This tells us that simply going from sedentary to a little activity captures a large share of the benefits we’ll get from exercise. So someone who works in a bit of VILPA and someone who exercises regularly are both going to see massive gains compared to someone who is totally inactive.
One additional study looking at that U.K. Biobank data illustrates this point. It focused specifically on the risk of heart attack. It found adding vigorous physical activity sharply cut risks. But after a total of about 20 minutes a week, additional gains were negligible [8].
Implications
So what does this research mean for our exercise targets? Should we totally ignore WHO recommendations?
The first big lesson is this: Moving from inactive to active is the most important step. Just adding a little vigorous activity into our daily routine will pay big dividends.
If you need the extra motivation to start moving, that’s the data to look at.
This is actually really important. Despite the fact that we all know exercise is essential to our health, most adults over 40 don’t do it regularly [7]. And the reason why is that it can feel overwhelming to work 150 minutes of structured exercise into a normal week. So many don’t even try.
What these studies show is that it isn’t all or nothing. Because of time-constraints and other commitments, just because we can’t do 150 minutes doesn’t mean we can’t dramatically improve our health with much less. That knowledge is empowering.
The second lesson is that exercise doesn’t have to fit the traditional pattern. We don’t have to set aside an hour to go to the gym. The VILPA study shows us that we can get huge benefits from bouts of vigorous activity just 1-2 minutes in length [7].
And this is why I always encourage my patients at the clinic to try adding “exercise snacks” to their day. Personally, I’ll do some sets of push-ups or wall squats during my breaks at
work. I can easily do a 1-2-minute bout of activity a few times a day. I don’t have to head to the gym, I don’t need special equipment, and I don’t have to shower afterward because the duration of each exercise snack is small enough that I don’t work up a sweat.
Instead of using the elevator at work, you can choose the stairs. You can park further away from your workplace — so long as it’s safe to do so — and have a 5-10 minute walk. The key takeaway is that getting your exercise this way, in little bites, can yield benefits similar to traditional ways of doing things. And for most of us, it’s a lot easier to manage.
Now just to be clear, if you do have the time to exercise more frequently, you will get additional benefits. One long-term cohort study even found we could gain additional health benefits from getting up to 300 minutes a week of vigorous activity or 600 minutes of moderate activity [9].
So if you want to truly maximize the health benefits from exercise, those targets are useful. Personally, I aim for those targets because I don’t want to leave any gains on the table. That’s also why I take creatine and TMG as part of MicroVitamin+ Powder to boost my workout capacity. But the point I want to emphasize is that we can do a lot of good for our health even at a much lower volume of exercise. And all of us can add “exercise snacks” to our schedule, no matter how busy we are.
Reference List
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2804956/
2. https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/physical-activity-guidelines-for-adults-aged-19-to-64/
3. https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/9789240015128
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15383407/
5. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35788615/
6. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/full/10.1161/JAHA.124.039225
7. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9800274/
8. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38016070/
9. https://www.ahajournals.org/doi/epub/10.1161/CIRCULATIONAHA.121.058162
