Are You Working Out Hard Enough?

December 02, 2011, By Avery Hurt 1 comment

Avery Hurt

People often complain that most dietary advice is confusing and contradictory. Coffee is a killer one week, good for you the next. The same can be said for advice about exercise: What's it supposed to be? Thirty minutes a week? An hour a week? Ten minutes here and there when you find the time? And the big question, the one for which it is really hard to get a straight answer, is this: How hard do I have to work out for it to be worth the trouble?

Recently I was writing an article for another publication and pulled up lots of research, much of it quite recent and with good sample sizes, that suggested that you really don't have to knock yourself out. Just get off the couch and do something. It is a message we are seeing all over the place these days: Park at the back of the lot, take the dog for a walk, walk down the hall to a colleague's cubicle and deliver that memo rather than shooting a quick email. We simply need to get more movement in our lives.

However, one of my sources for that article, an exercise physiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, begged to differ. Even though we don't like to hear it, intensity matters. I took another look at the research and saw a great deal of support for his claim. So what gives? How hard do we need to work if we want to lose a little weight, bring down our cholesterol and reduce the risk of a boat-load of nasty illnesses? Can I really expect to see results from a leisurely stroll around the block a couple of times a day, or do I need to beat myself into submission on the squash court?

Consistent Advice Is Out There

As with most things in the world of health-related research, when you dig down deep enough the advice is not as contradictory as it seems at first pass. If you haven't been doing much of anything, then any amount of exercise will help. That's where we get that advice to park at the back of the lot or walk to your buddy's cubicle.

However, if you really want to make a long-term difference in your health, this should be considered only a starting point. Eventually—no matter how gradually you get there—you'll need to do more. And that's the idea: You'll start with a leisurely stroll (say, to the mailbox and back). And that may be fine if you've spent the last twenty years rolling back and forth between desk and couch, but eventually you'll need to build up to what we all really need to be doing, which is, according to almost everyone who explained this to me, an hour a day most days of moderate exercise.

Ah yes, but now we ask, what is moderate? The answer lies somewhere between the stroll around the block and the Ironman, but fortunately much closer to the stroll. You need to be a little bit out of breath and break a bit of a sweat.

Gerald Endress, exercise physiologist and fitness director of the Duke University Diet and Fitness Center, suggests this simple rule of thumb: If you're breathing a little harder than normal but can still carry on a conversation, you're about right. If you can sing, you're not working hard enough. "Even moderate intensity exercise helps reduce disease risk," says Endress. He adds that his patients at the fitness center usually start seeing results within a few weeks—as long as they don't reward themselves for their moderate effort with an equally moderate increase in calories.