Physical activity has become a focal point for many health seekers and health educators as well as the mainstream media lately. Exercise is touted as an important self care tool for people who want to lose weight for improvement of health and/or body image. If you want to know “how much exercise a person needs?” and “how long one need to exercise for?” in order to maintain health and well being, this article is for you.
National Health Guidance
The general advise that adults are given is to ensure they are walking or active for at least 30 minutes per day for at least five days per week. Adults require at least 150 hours of moderate exercise each week to prevent the metabolic diseases associated with a sedentary life style according to Dr E Laskowski.
In this review I would like to look at some of the benefits of exercise and some of the guidelines for adults who are seeking to improve their physical health and/or appearance and stave off chronic illness that are linked to lack of exercise.
Practical Considerations
There are people whose jobs are most well suited to sitting for hours on end in an office, while there are others like some nurses and doctors who have to be on their feet for twelve to fifteen hours a day. People in the former group would need to be intentional about getting the required level of exercise each day.
So for example, an office worker who decides to walk for 30 minutes to and from the train station each day would have covered the 150 hours of moderate exercise they require. The minimum daily recommended time spent in activity that counts as exercise may be cut down to half if the exercise is intensive. According to the United Kingdom’s Chief Medical Officer’s Guidelines 75 hours/week spent in vigorous exercise also meets the requirements for adults.
Examples and Alternatives:
So what are some activities that count as moderate exercise? According to NHS guidelines (United Kingdom); riding a bike or going for a brisk walk, doing the lawn (pushing as opposed to riding) counts as moderate aerobic exercise, as does hiking or dancing (some slower types, of course).
Although these national health guidelines do not specify the level of fitness of the individuals, they describe the intensive or vigorous exercise to be the kind that makes one become breathless and have a noticeable increase in heart rate. Examples of vigorous exercise includes jogging, dancing the jive, tennis (singles) and football.
What About Light Exercise?
According to Nutrition Source, light exercise includes office work such as sitting at the computer, playing a musical instrument, fishing, taking a stroll. This would burn about 70 calories per hour in a person weighing 160 pounds.
High Intensity Interval Training HIIT:
According to Senior Personal Fitness Trainer Phil Goulding, (writing for Nuffield Health in the UK) this is a type of cardio exercise that may be divided in to Sprint Interval Training (SIT) and High Intensity Training (HIT). The former he recommends for well conditioned individuals while he recommends the latter for average gym-goers and the general public.
He describes SIT as a maximum intensity workout that is repeated between three and 5 times over about 25 seconds each with a rest interval of about three minutes. Normally the training sessions of 3-5 reps would be sustained until the level of intensity can no longer be sustained.
HIT sessions are describes as having a duration of half to three minutes intervals with equal duration of recovery periods. This may then be done with the aim of building up to the level of SIT sessions as fitness improves and the intervals shorten.
What About Weight Loss Exercise?
In order to use exercise as a weight loss approach it is important to have a goal, and a plan on how to go about using exercise to help you loose weight. It is best to start off gradually. And also get some kind of support network in place. This may be just your partner, it may be your family (partner and children) or it may be you chemist or a GP practice nurse, or a personal trainer.
Your goal needs to be realist and the plan need to be a medium to long term lifestyle change process. Some things to consider is that when you increase you activity levels you may start feeling like a need to eat more food. Some minerals and vitamins required to support your nutritional state and keep hunger at bay during weight loss and increased exercise, includes magnesium, vitamin C and B complex.
Have A Plan And Enlist The Support That You Need
You would need to plan in advance to keep you energy intake around the same as before you started exercising and therefore plan to incorporate more foods to stave off the hunger while maintaining your calorie intake.
Hence, You may need nutritional supplements to replace mineral and vitamin loss during exercise, along with increased amounts of salads and nuts and seeds to keep the balance of nutritional intake and energy expenditure. The aim should be to increase physical activity while maintaining your usual energy intake, as it would be more difficult (and may be even unsafe) to increase your energy output while reducing calorie intake.
So do your research and enlist the help of a personal trainer or health coach to ensure you set yourself up for success from the start of your journey to look or feel better or just to maintain your health.
In Summary
It seems that generally fitness experts would recommend about 20 minutes of HIIT in a day as a minimum. So as the intensity of the workout increases, the generally recommended minimum exercise duration decreases. It is important that people who are not yet fit or generally sedentary build up their exercise routine gradually and seek professional advice if they have any illness or special needs. Any major changes to your lifestyle and fitness routine should be discussed with your health care provider.
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