Before you decide how much exercise you need, it's a good idea to know what your exercise goals are in the first place. Thomas Barwick/GettyImages
How much exercise is enough? It depends on your health and goals.
"How much exercise is enough for what?" asks David Bassett Jr., Ph.D., a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He explains that, before you decide on how much you need, you should have a good idea of your exercise goal or goals: Are you exercising for physical fitness, weight control, or as a way of keeping your stress levels low?
For general health benefits, a routine of daily walking may be sufficient, says Susan Joy, MD, co-director of the Kaiser Permanente Sports Medicine Center in Sacramento and team physician for the Sacramento Kings.
If your goal is more specific — say, to lower your blood pressure, improve your cardiovascular fitness, or lose weight — you'll need either more frequent exercise or a higher intensity of exercise.
“The medical literature continues to support the idea that exercise is medicine,” says Jeffrey E. Oken, MD, deputy chief of staff at the Edward Hines Jr. VA Hospital in Hines, Illinois. “Regular exercise can help lower risk of premature death, control your blood pressure, reduce the risk of type 2 diabetes, combat obesity, improve your lung function, and help treat depression.”
Here, experts break down exactly how much exercise is enough, on the basis of your personal health and fitness goals.
Current Physical Fitness Guidelines for Adults and Kids
According to guidelines from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), for general health adults should aim for 150 to 300 minutes of moderate physical activity or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity each week. When repeated regularly, aerobic activity improves cardiorespiratory fitness. Running, brisk walking, swimming, and cycling are all forms of aerobic activity.
Additionally, HHS encourages balance and stretching activities to enhance flexibility, as well as muscle-strengthening workouts two or more times a week. Older adults should focus more on balance exercises — like tai chi, which has been shown to improve stability and decrease fracture risk in older adults, according to a 2013 review published in December 2013 in the European Journal of Integrative Medicine — and continue to do as much aerobic and muscle-strengthening activities as their bodies can handle.
RELATED: Report Finds a Large Majority of Adults Not Meeting Exercise Recommendations
The most recent version of the HHS physical activity guidelines (which were updated in 2018) eliminated the longstanding recommendation that exercise had to last at least 10 minutes to be counted toward your weekly requirement. According to the current guidelines, any increment of physical activity can be counted toward your weekly goal.
“This may stem from the concern that if people can’t do 10 minutes, they may get discouraged and do nothing,” says Neal Pire, CSCS, an exercise physiologist and the national director of wellness services at Castle Connolly Private Health Partners in New York City. According to HHS, nearly 80 percent of adults are not meeting those minimum aerobic and muscle-strengthening exercise benchmarks.
“Any time or form of exercise is better than none, whether it’s 1, 5, or 30 minutes,” Pire says.
The HHS encourages more playtime for preschool-aged children to enhance growth and development. This includes a mix of unstructured and active play, like biking, jumping, or swimming.
Children and adolescents between the ages of 6 and 17 should do one hour of moderate or vigorous physical activity a day. The majority of those 60 minutes should be spent doing an aerobic activity — that which involves repetitive use of the large muscles, getting heart rate and breathing up.
According to the guidelines, children and adolescents should do muscle-strengthening and bone-strengthening activities, like jumping or exercises that use body weight for resistance, three times per week.
Another important part of the HHS physical activity guidelines for all adults is a warning about the health risks associated with a sedentary lifestyle. The guidelines recommend adults should move more and sit less throughout the day, though specific limits to sitting time are not specified.
How Many Exercises Do You Need to Lose Weight or Maintain Weight Loss?
Research consistently shows that, to lose weight, integrating exercise into your routine helps. For example, in one study published in August 2012 in the journal Obesity, women whom both dieted and exercised lost more weight than those who only dieted.
Still, if you’re trying to control your weight through exercise, the general HHS activity guidelines might not be sufficient; you’re likely going to need to devote some extra time to exercise.
According to the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), 150 to 250 minutes per week of moderate-intensity physical activity yields only modest weight-loss results, and to lose a significant amount of weight, you may need to perform the moderate-intensity exercise more than 250 minutes per week (in addition to dietary intervention). So how much exercise do you need in a day? That equates to about one hour, five days per week.
The government suggests that those looking to lose a substantial amount of weight or more than 5 percent of their body weight, should do more than 300 minutes of moderate-intensity activity a week to reach their goals.
If you increase your intensity, you can reap similar weight-control benefits in about one-half the time. For example, in one study published in January 2017 in the Journal of Diabetes Research, women who performed high-intensity interval exercise lost the same amount of weight and body fat compared with those who performed moderate-intensity cardio, but they did it while exercising for significantly less time.
It’s important to remember that once you hit your weight loss goals, you need to continue exercising to make sure you don’t regain the weight. A study published in August 2014 in the Journal of Primary Prevention that analyzed data from 81 studies investigating the role of exercise in weight management found that one of the biggest ways exercise helps with weight management is by preventing weight gain (perhaps even more than it helps you lose weight).
Though the ACSM recommends performing more than 250 minutes of exercise per week to prevent weight regain, the HHS says it varies: Some need more physical activity than others to maintain healthy body weight, to lose weight, or to keep weight off once it has been lost.
To both lose weight and prevent weight regain, the ACSM recommends performing strength-training exercises to increase the body’s levels of fat-free mass, which improves metabolic rate. That’s why when Harvard researchers followed 10,500 men over the course of 12 years, those who performed 20 minutes of strength training per day gained less abdominal fat compared with those who spent the same amount of time performing cardiovascular exercise, according to data published in the February 2015 issue of the journal Obesity.
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