I have heard of and even seen peope make big changes to their body and health with only 15, 30, or 60 minutes of exercise a day. It doesn’t even seem like much.
Whether it’s cardio or lifting weights, why do people only need that much time a day to improve? In fact, why does MORE time with exercise (like 3 hours or more) even seem harmful?
I know diet plays a big role but still. Like I started strength training for only 15 minutes a day and I see some changes in my body physically.
In: Biology
nowadays, it’s possible for people to get almost ZERO exercise. A lot of people drive everywhere, sit all day at their job, get their food and other groceries delivered, and just sit on their couch in their free time. This is extremely bad for our bodies. If we don’t use our muscles and heart, they will get weaker. Doing some exercise at least keeps them as they are. However, once people start doing a little exercise, they usually keep it up and will be healthier overall.
Because your body is basically a machine. Let it sit “idle”, and it falls into disrepair. Keep it tuned up, and you will see it operating well for decades.
There are ample studies that show the best way to lose excess weight, permanently, is to walk for an hour, 3-4 days a week. Do that, and pounds will melt away gradually, you will not “plateau” as with other exercise programs, and you will KEEP those lost pounds away. Even if you change NOTHING else about your habits.
You’re body is designed to build itself for whatever it expects to face again in the future. Even of you’re only doing a little bit exercise, you’re body will body itself to prepare for that. If you’re doing nothing, then they body has nothing to build into a falls into disrepair.
60 minutes of exercise per day is over 4% of your entire life. You probably eat less than that. Given you sleep 1/3 of your life, that’s over 6% of your waking hours. If you got paid $15/hour for that, you’d make over $5,000 more per year. Imagine spending $5k/year and *not* getting results.
[Basal metabolic rate – Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basal_metabolic_rate)
each time you exercise you both (1) burn calories immediately and (2) build muscle over a period of days.
Your muscle mass uses calories every day whether you’re idle or not.
There is this incrementalist approach to fitness where you don’t really diet, you just start paying attention to your calories and maybe stop overeating, and just build muscle little by little. edit: it takes dedication but it’s not hard work (edit: saying it’s easy is unfair). eventually you reach a tipping point and begin slimming very quickly.
The big thing about exercise is that it isn’t how hard it is, it’s how consistently you do it.
If you do 30-60 minutes of exercise over an entire week, it’s not going to do a lot.
It you do 3.5-7 hours of exercise in one dose it’s going to physically injure you and you will spend the rest of the week desperately trying to recover from that.
But if you do exercise consistently, you’re getting it used to it and letting the damage you do recover by the time you next do the exercise.
Eventually you reach a plateau, because infinite growth isn’t real, but you don’t tend to backslide easily as long as you keep up
OP you realize how hard it is to do 60 minutes of intense exercise? Repeat 3-6 times per week rotating the muscle groups and reap the benefits. Realistically most people cannot recover from more than that if you’re actually working out effectively you will be sore every day. Enjoy.
The first thing to understand is that in nature most animals don’t spend a lot of time being active, there is a lot of down time. If you think of lions, certainly they have periods of high activity, but they also have 15-20 hour periods of resting. For most mammals, the period of their day taken up by high intensity work is pretty small.
There are different ways to come at this question, but the most basic is that 30-60 minutes is usually enough time to signal to your body to adapt. In the case of muscle building, its enough to signal to your body that it should be building muscle.
It’s not really the exercise itself that causes the benefits, but all of the subsequent processes it kicks off. Another way to put it is that our body has evolved its signaling around the average day, and the average day for humans probably only had 30-60 minutes of high intensity work.
Because its all mostly signaling, once the body has got the signal, well doing more isn’t going to do anything extra. It’s like if you are pouring water into a cup, maybe the more and more you pour into it the better, but once it starts pouring over you’re not getting any more benefit.
To continue with the cup analogy, you can also fill that cup more slowly and get a similar signal. The 30-60 minutes usually refers to moderate to high intensity activity, but low intensity can work if done long enough, within reason.
With exercise, going too far beyond can be harmful because the body only has so much recovery capacity. Running a 25k can provide a lot of signal, but it can also put a toll on your body.
Really, the reverse of that question is probably more illuminating, if our bodies can kick of these signals whenever they want, why not just do it without exercise? The basic answer is that those adaptations are very expensive to maintain and that in an environment with poor resources those adaptations may be more of a hindrance. Excess muscle mass is a good example, it can provide a lot of benefit, but it is very costly in terms of energy so the body is stingy with how much it can grow. The body in general tries to adapt to the stress that is put on it.
As a side example, there are some genetic mutations that cause an animal to grow excess muscles.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Blue](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgian_Blue)
You can get big improvements from just ONE well structured full body workout a week. Takes about an hour. Add another day of dedicated zone 2 cardio.
Because are bodies evolved to be a little active. Not completely sedentary, not constantly active. Every animal is different. Cats sleep like 20 hours a day. For us, 60 minutes of moderate activity is about right.
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