Wondering how many hours you should devote for exercise per day or week? It's recommended that adults get about 2.5 hours of moderate intensity physical activity each week, or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity, to get all the health benefits of exercise.
Moderate physical activity is any movement that raises your heart rate, makes you breathe faster and feel warmer. If you exercise at this level, you’ll be able to talk while exercising but you won't be able to sing. This tends to include activities such as brisk walking, cycling, dancing and hiking. Anything more than that, such as running or swimming where you have to breathe hard and fast, is considered vigorous activity. Additionally, strength training, which trains all the major muscle groups of the body, should be incorporated into your workout routine at least two days per week.
What else do you need to know?
- It is important to remember that if you are not very active at the moment, then a small increase in activity levels really helps. A really good start is to think about your current level and then think about how you can fit a little more activity into your day. If you aim for moderate exercise intensity, you should do between 21 and 38 minutes of exercise per day. While this may seem like a lot and hard to keep up with, if you're new to regular exercise, it's much easier when you're doing something you enjoy.
- If you want to build your cardiovascular fitness, then you should aim for two to three sessions a week of at least 20 to 30 minutes to start with. One workout a week that resulted in very slow cardio progress. You should aim for two to three sessions per week.
- Exercise is integral to maintaining bone and muscle health. As we age, if we don't put our bodies under weight-bearing exercise, we lose muscle mass and bone density which contributes to conditions like osteoporosis.
- But not only that, exercise has been shown to play an integral role in our mental health. It can reduce rates of anxiety and depression, improve mood, self-esteem and cognitive function.
- As many sports come with their own communities, from clubs and walking groups to weightlifting gyms and rowing groups, exercise can also help reduce feelings of loneliness and prevent social withdrawal.
- Other measures of exercise include helping with better sleep, increasing productivity, improving learning, more social interaction, and reducing stress. And, if you've been working from home recently, something as simple and gentle as yoga can improve your posture.
To sum up with, physical activity in all phases of our lives helps in such necessary aspects as: high self-esteem, recreation, social interaction, maintaining mobility, and even maintaining basic skills of daily living for the elderly such as clothing, nutrition, personal hygiene, walking.