Researchers keep moving the goal posts on exercise. For a while, the trend was to show benefits of minimal exercise, perhaps as an olive branch to people too busy for a full workout. Lately, the trend is essentially to say effort matters; more exercise means better health. Both are right. But one overrides standard health guidelines.
Health institutions say people need about 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of intense aerobic exercise each week. Moderate exercise might be brisk walking or active gardening, while intense exercise would include uphill cycling, sprints, tennis or squash.
Twenty-six inactive, overweight, but otherwise healthy, middle-aged men were placed in two exercise programs. For 10 weeks three times a week, one group did four four-minute intense sessionswith rest intervals, while the other group did one four-minute intense session.
The four-minute men had increased their endurance and showed other positive health results on par with the men doing four sessions per workout.
The researchers qualified the study by saying that the program should be viewed as a kick-start to more exercise, though that part got lost in much of the media coverage. The take-away in some cases was: We don’t need a lot of exercise to be healthy.
Minutes-long workouts offer health improvements for otherwise inactive people. But things get flabby when the fruit of short workouts is compared to that of workouts adding up to 150 minutes or more a week. Nuria Rosique Esteban, a health researcher at the Human Nutrition Unit at the Pere Virgili Institute in Reus, Spain, points out that there are no peer-reviewed studies showing that minutes-long workouts offer the same health benefits as workouts in line with standard guidelines.
Compared to the mail carriers, the office workers had fatter waistlines, higher BMIs and other metabolic risk factors for heart disease. Between home and work, many office workers sat for 15 hours a day, the researchers found. Assuming they had eight hours of sleep, these workers were on their feet for only one hour each day.
The study indicates that 15,000 steps per day, or 7 miles of walking, is the level of activity we need to be healthy, says William Tigbe, a lecturer at the University of Warwick’s medical school and lead author of the study.
In a study recently published in JAMA Oncology, 384 older women were divided into two exercise programs: one was 150 minutes and the other 300 minutes of moderate/intense aerobic exercise each week. The latter group lost significantly more body fat over the 12-month study period, decreasing their risk of heart disease and cancer.
In other words, 300 minutes, or one hour of exercise five times a week, was better than 150 minutes.
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) suggests 300 minutes for people age 55 and older or other people who want additional health benefits.
But it doesn’t stop there. The CDC and other health agencies also suggest strengthening exercises twice a week of all major muscle groups. If 60 minutes is allocated to strengthening, we are now at 360 minutes, or six hours, of weekly exercise.
