CFC
Bluelight Crew
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2013
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Most of you are probably aware of the various campaigns in most developed countries to get people to do a minimum of 30 minutes of exercise per day. For the average health-nut or bodybuilder, this is a trifling amount and easily surpassed. However for most ordinary people, especially those over 30, even this target has proved astonishingly difficult to reach.
Therefore it seems even more depressing to discover, as the most recent meta-analysis of relevant health studies has, that the optimal amount of exercise required to lessen the risk of developing various health conditions - from diabetes and stroke to colon cancer - is actually around 2-3 hours per day!
For a nice summary of that study with graphs, head over to Ergo-log for a quick browse.
However one major caveat to the study, aside from the fact it's purely observational data, is that health researchers calculated the total exercise required using something called MET minutes - metabolic-equivalent minutes of exercise. MET minutes can be made up from such mundane activities as gardening, hoovering, or simply walking to the shops. In other words, rather low-intensity exercise.
We now know, as an increasing body of research has demonstrated - some of which we've discussed before here - that high-intensity cardio is substantially more beneficial than low- or medium-intensity cardio. Just a few minutes of genuinely HIIT can provide the same benefit derived from as much as an hour of less intense cardio.
In other words, some forms of exercise are greater than the sum of their parts, delivering benefits that exceed by many times their theoretical 'MET minutes' equivalent. Therefore analyses like this need to be put into perspective: it may be that as little as just 30 minutes of HIIT per week, or a few hours of high-intensity weight training, could provide equivalent or greater benefit than 15-20 hours of this low-intensity exercise.
So if you really don't feel like smashing the gym or hitting the track for several hours each day, you probably don't need to feel too guilty - yet
Therefore it seems even more depressing to discover, as the most recent meta-analysis of relevant health studies has, that the optimal amount of exercise required to lessen the risk of developing various health conditions - from diabetes and stroke to colon cancer - is actually around 2-3 hours per day!
For a nice summary of that study with graphs, head over to Ergo-log for a quick browse.
However one major caveat to the study, aside from the fact it's purely observational data, is that health researchers calculated the total exercise required using something called MET minutes - metabolic-equivalent minutes of exercise. MET minutes can be made up from such mundane activities as gardening, hoovering, or simply walking to the shops. In other words, rather low-intensity exercise.
We now know, as an increasing body of research has demonstrated - some of which we've discussed before here - that high-intensity cardio is substantially more beneficial than low- or medium-intensity cardio. Just a few minutes of genuinely HIIT can provide the same benefit derived from as much as an hour of less intense cardio.
In other words, some forms of exercise are greater than the sum of their parts, delivering benefits that exceed by many times their theoretical 'MET minutes' equivalent. Therefore analyses like this need to be put into perspective: it may be that as little as just 30 minutes of HIIT per week, or a few hours of high-intensity weight training, could provide equivalent or greater benefit than 15-20 hours of this low-intensity exercise.
So if you really don't feel like smashing the gym or hitting the track for several hours each day, you probably don't need to feel too guilty - yet
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