How much exercise is enough?
- Josh Turner
- Aug 30, 2024
- 3 min read
How much exercise is enough?
A conversation I am having almost daily with patients is how much exercise should they be doing. Everyone I talk to seems to have a different idea about how to answer this question. Some patients feel that one exercise is one too many for them, others may have a regimented 7 day/week program targeting every muscle in the body. Or if you’re most people, you know some exercise is good, but how little can you get away with and still get the benefits? After all, you don’t want to wear yourself out!
The answer to the question requires another question, how much exercise is enough for what? You see, the people I just described all have different goals. One might be trying to recovery from a shoulder injury, another just trying to be healthy and yet another training for a lifting competition. For the purposes of this blog post, I’m going to focus on person 1 and person 2. While person 3 has a noble and challenging goal set ahead of them, it differs from the other two in that it’s a performance-related goal, rather than a functional or health-related goal. I find many people with performance-related goals don’t need to be spurred on for more exercise, in some cases, their training needs to be reined in, and that is a topic for another post.
Let’s focus on person 1 to begin, a case of recovering from an injury or managing a health condition. The first thing we need to discuss is pain. Sometimes, pain is a helpful barrier that prevents us from doing too much, while other times pushing into a little pain is ok, but working with moderate to severe pain is generally not recommend. A physiotherapist can help you sort out whether pushing into some pain is advisable given your injury. Furthermore, whether it's recovering from an injury or managing a health condition, pushing to exhaustion doesn't tend to be a good idea. Overall, if you fall into the same category as person 1, your often best to get personalized recommendations from health care professional when it comes to exercise.
Person 2 is similar to person 1 in that their goal is still health-related, but they are not actively trying to manage recovery or a health condition, meaning some of the previously mentioned tips may not apply. A great place to start in this case is the Canadian Physical Activity Guidelines. This is a resource which I have discussed in an Instagram/Facebook post but would benefit from discussing in more detail. Basically, the guidelines are the culmination of work from a lot of smart people who used research from many other smart people to determine how much exercise was required to maintain good health in an average healthy individual (keyword being average, no single individual is an average but this can still be a helpful starting point). They recommend 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity every week for adults including at least 2 days of resistance training (topic for another blog post as well). In addition they recommend 7-9 hours of sleep and no more than 8 hours of sedentary time. The advice changes some if you are younger than 18 or over 65 years old, see the recommendations in the links below.
A key lesson to be learned here is that how much is enough doesn’t require you to become a gym rat or train for a marathon. Exercise that results in health benefits isn’t out of reach, and usually the difference between nothing and something is where the most benefit comes from. Another key takeaway is that how much is enough can vary between people and the circumstance they find themselves in (especially when considering a health condition or injury). To start being more active, a physiotherapist can help you by determining the appropriate level of activity for you and providing you with necessary techniques to get you moving! If you think you would benefit from some help with figuring out how exercise can be used to achieve your health-related goals, get in touch with us at Genesis Physiotherapy & Rehabilitation! We are happy to help!
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