How much exercise do we need to do to stay healthy?
Well the world health organization recommends 150 minutes a week of moderate to high intensity exercise in order to maintain health. With the pandemic that’s just happened we already know that this is probably a good thing that we we need to do in order to keep our lungs healthy and hopefully help us have a better and stronger immune system in order to fight off any viruses that might be around.
150 minutes might sound an awful lot but actually it’s not as bad as you think it is. If we were to break that down into five equal sections it would give us 30 minutes of five equal sections. That could be 30 minutes a day of exercise say Monday to Friday which is not too bad.
Now here’s where it gets even better. The world health organization recommends that we do a minimum of 10 minutes. We could break those 30 minutes down into three 10-minute slots. This works really well if you’re short of time, in that you could do 10 minutes before breakfast, 10 minutes at lunch time, and 10 minutes in the evening and you’re covered for maintaining your health with exercise.
The great thing about using exercise to maintain your health is it can increase the density and the strength of your bones. It increases your muscle mass which burns more calories. It also helps to unlock fat so that we have a good cycle of fat storage and fat release so that we have and are able to use that fat that we store, which I think we all do.
We all have a little bit. Some of us a bit more than most after the pandemic and I know I certainly got a little bit extra myself.
What can we do what’s moderate to high intensity exercise?
If we were thinking of a scale of one to ten Where one is we’re sound asleep and ten is that we’re working at our hardest we’re about to throw up and we think we’re gonna die. Moderate would be around a seven so, where you can actually work quite hard but you can still maintain talking.
This would be like going out for a walk with a friend walking very briskly but still able to hold a conversation.
High intensity is where you’re actually working so hard that you’re really struggling to talk at the same time.
Quite often we hear of high intensity interval training and that’s where we work at a very maximum level for a short period of time and then take a break.
One of the good things that the world’s held the world health organization has said is that we don’t have to go into a gym. We don’t need to use any equipment in order to get those 150 minutes a week to maintain our health with exercise.
What we can do is, they that they’ve offered a range of things. We could just go out for a walk, maybe go for a jog or do anything like that, but within that is anything that gets our heart rate up.
This also includes house cleaning and all of those chores.
We don’t think of it, but the faster we do it the more our heart rate comes up. Certainly scrubbing the bath or scrubbing the floor you soon know that your breathing is getting heavier and it’s becoming more laboured and you’re working hard.
It’s not called labour for nothing.
We also can do things like the gardening that would work just as well. We don’t need to be going out buying any expensive equipment or going to a gym to do it.
Now obviously an owner of a gym like myself, I’d love it for you to come to see me and there are benefits of having to see someone who can help you out who can encourage you as well. But you don’t have to.
You could do this all yourself. You can go out and just go for a brisk walk. You don’t have to start with 150 minutes we can work up to that if you’re new to exercise.
If you’ve lived quite a sedentary lifestyle for quite a long time then any start is good. It could just be 10 minutes a day. Then after a while you could up that to 20 minutes a day and after a while you could up that to 30 minutes a day.
So 30 minutes a day five days a week is what the world health organization recommends for us to stay healthy that also helps us with building stronger bones stronger muscles which demands more calories and helps with our cardiovascular system so our heart our lungs and all of those i hope this helps.