> 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).
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.
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 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.
I think ebikes are amazing but it is more than a bit sad to me that less than half the people moving around in my neighborhood put in any energy. There's like two bicyclists under 25. Many many many scooters and ebikes.
Very torn on this one. I love it for them, but also, it seems super sad to me. I can't even really explain why it's so saddening.
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.
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.
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.
Light and moderate are mostly just "activities of daily life" (walking, commuting), and vigorous is whenever you exercise explicitly (running, swimming, speed cycling, soccer, etc). So it's more like 9 hours of active movement, or 4.5 hours of exercise (40 mins a day).
"exercise doesn't mean planned / scheduled exercise, like going to the gym."
Most of the people I see in the gym are sitting on the benches on their phone 9 minutes out of 10. I'm pretty sure going to the gym is not helping at all...
If you're doing heavy compound exercises like 3x5, 5x3 squats, you kind of need to wait three minutes in between! Even adding something in between like press or pullups is quite hard on the nervous system.
The people who walk 45m on the treadmill while watching a show, or people who sit around chit chatting, yes... A waste of space.
Calling it 'the gym' sort of conflates its two distinct sections: the one containing cardio equipment, and the other containing strength training/bodybuilding equipment. So-called 'work capacity' aside, there's almost zero overlap between the two sections.
Whether someone's effectively strength training/bodybuilding or not, which is the section I think you refer to—nobody reasonably believes that does anything significant for cardiovascular health, which is the topic being dicussed here.
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.
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...
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.
In my experience lifting weights helps you grow enough muscle to actually be able to do 600 minutes of cardio.
With small/insufficient muscle size, you simply run out of stored glycogen before you get tired cardiovascularly.
> 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
Proper exercise is absolutely a lifestyle change and a big commitment. Not only do you have to exercise several hours a week, but also eat healthier macros and fix your sleep to make sure most of the benefits stick and aren't wasted.
People try to half-ass it all the time by doing weird diets or going on 15 minutes walk during their lunch break, and yes it's better than nothing, but not by much.
I don't understand how walking in the study is considerate moderate.
Like my heartrate for sure goes higher when lifting weights than when I walk.
If I walk fast, it might get closer, but I am not that confident.
300 minutes of HIIT per week are equal to 10 HIIT sessions per week, I would argue that's outright impossible, the body cannot handle that, I don't think even an Olympic athlete can handle more than 3 times per week HIIT.
Vigorous might be possible, that's still 5 times 1 hour cardio sessions, on top of which you have to add 3 sessions of weight lifting for bone density, on top of which you have to add balance training and stretching.
There isn't enough time in a day to do that if you work, let alone if you have kids
>With small/insufficient muscle size, you simply run out of stored glycogen before you get tired cardiovascularly.
You can eat carbs during cardio ("fueling") though it's unlikely an issue doing 600 mins a week. Muscles store 15g of glycogen per 1kg (more for trained athletes) , which amounts to 60 (k)calories. In aerobic process with COP ~ 25% these nicely convert to output energy of 60 kJ. To produce this much output over 90 minutes you need to push power of ~11 watt. Elite athletes have FTP (functional threshold power) around 6 w/kg. It's over the entire body mass, not just muscle, but even if you are pushing 50% body fat, you can be pretty confident you have enough glycogen for 90 min of aerobic exercise at your FTP (also liver holds/can produce on demand quite a lot of glycogen and aerobic process will use fat for energy as well). Even if you do 200 minutes 3 times a week instead of doing 90 minutes every day you can get by staying in under 3 w/kg power zone, which is still greater than most people's FTP (and even fewer people can hold this power over 3 hours).
In my own experience, no. Strictly cardio. The number of squats you'd have to do to constitue even five minutes of vigorous activity is practicably impossible.
Lifting weights could certainly count/classify as moderate activity though, just without as much 'bang for your buck' as dedicated aerobic exercise.
It would depend on how high your heart rate goes and stays during lifting weights, because everyone lifts weights differently. I would say that it's not likely based on my own personal experience, and seeing others' time ratios for lifting vs resting.
No of course, but to keep bone density up as you age, weight lifting is your best bet, while 560 minutes of cardio is your best bet for the heart it seems
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
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.
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.
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.
The easiest thing for people to do if they aren't confident about their level of stress (moderate vs vigorous vs maximal) is to wear a smart watch with a HR monitor. They aren't perfect (chest straps better yada yada) but you can see your HR zones and if you are in Z1 you are moderate, Z2/3 vigorous.
The language isn't that precise because a trained marathoner is doing 7 minute miles for two hours at 50% of the populations resting heart rate.
I've got multiple wearables and they all seem to agree that normal walking does nothing for me. Barely increases my heart rate, not even Z1. Nor does "doing chores" which seems even more nebulous. But that's just a data point of one.
I skimmed the study rather than the article about it and I don't see them define it at all. They just had a machine learning model take accelerometer data and classified it into "sleep, sedentary behaviour, light physical activity and MVPA". Whether any form of walking counts as light or moderate in this classification is really anyone's guess
Right. It is a weakness and makes the meta analyses super important. I can't see all but trained athletes doing even low zone cardio for that much time. But I can see an active person walking, moving around, 12K steps, with a couple hours of genuine workouts / wk hitting that threshold. That matches with how I understand the rest of the studies on this better as well.
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.
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.
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.
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 mean I get you are trying to imply this is some type of luxury but I've been exercising almost daily my entire life from when I was an unemployed teenager to now at 40yo making a respectable living. It has absolutely nothing to do with wealth. Hell during a rough spot in my life I was homeless for a week and was still working out daily. For me it's literally my anti-depressant.
What it honestly comes down to is people absolutely love to make excuses, simple as.
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)
I'm genuinely surprised to read people saying this.
Walking, housework, gardening, etc are all classed as moderate for this purpose, whilst things like running or lifting weights are vigorous and count double.
So we're only talking about a couple of dedicated exercise sessions a week, on top of an hour of non-sedentary activities each a day.
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.
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.
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.
> 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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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 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.
"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 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.
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.
> 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.