How Much Physical Activity is Needed to Improve Your Health and Fitness?

As we creep closer and closer to the New Year, it’s likely that you’ll eventually start thinking about your goals for 2020 (if you’re not thinking about goals or, if you’re not a goal-believer, aspirations, then I suggest you start). For many people, better health and fitness will be on the slate as one of those goals.

Which, as you well know, isn’t unusual. I’m pretty sure even the earliest homo sapiens had aspirations of being fitter (although, they wanted to improve fitness so they were better at catching and foraging food. Current homo sapiens want better fitness for less functional and more superficial reasons…not that that’s a bad thing). Today, I want to start the conversation by setting the tone for what you need to improve your health and fitness in the first place.

Because there is so much emphasis on High Intensity Interval Training and the “if it doesn’t hurt, it’s not working” mentality, many people are beginning their fitness journey 5 steps ahead of where they should be. Again, don’t misunderstand my words. HIIT training is one of the most effective ways to improve cardiovascular fitness, which is why it’s our main modality for cardio exercise at Thriveology.

However, just like you wouldn’t walk into a mechanics shop and try to swop out an engine without any mechanical experience, you shouldn’t walk into a Crossfit gym or Orange Theory or Round9 and jump into a level-10 intensity class if you haven’t worked out in years. So, before we talk about ways to begin your fitness journey correctly without getting burnt out, let’s look at what it takes to improve your fitness in the first place.

Physical Fitness and Playing Catch Up

The common belief is that, in order to get something out of physical activity, you must show some sort characteristic of working hard. For most people, those characteristics include sweating, heavy breathing and/or soreness after a workout. As the belief goes, if you don’t have one of these 3 characteristics, you aren’t getting any benefit…period.

Luckily, science is starting to catch up to the non-sense social norms that run rampant in society about what it takes to be fit. You see, as a field of study, fitness is relatively new comparable to other industries. Take astronomy, for instance. Mankind has quite literally been studying the stars since the beginning of time. However, if we wanted to put a date on it, many people would stamp the 1600s as the beginning of modern astronomy, which is when Galileo made some groundbreaking discoveries about movement of the planets.

If you do the math, that’s over 400 years of study that have been done on the universe. And guess what? Astronomers still don’t know what makes up 90% of the open space out in the cosmos (in case you’re wondering, they believe it’s a think called black matter. However, they can’t prove that black matter exists, therefore, it’s still up in the air. Yes, I am an astronomy geek as well).

To go back to fitness, although people have been performing physical activity to improve function, muscle tone, strength, power and aesthetics for centuries as well, the actual study of physical activity and its impact on the body is link to Dr. Ken Cooper upon his release of a book called Aerobics in 1968. Yes, that’s right. The study of physical fitness only started about 50 years ago. Which means this industry is truly in the infancy stages. And, although true experts in the industry understand this, it’s harder to show the general public that we’re constantly figuring things out.

No Pain, No Gain?

Which is why the real ground breaking research done recently is having a hard time overturning years of belief that you better have a hard time walking up the stairs after a leg workout (BTW, you don’t do leg workouts any more, do you?) or else you didn’t work hard enough. To help turn the tide, there are some recent studies that are worth pointing out that looked at the benefits of low-level activity to heart health.

One such study compared the risk of a cardiovascular disease-related event in 4 different levels of low-level physical activity. Low-level activity was measured by an accelerometer, which is a device that measures, you guessed it, acceleration. In this case, low-level activity is simply considered getting up and moving around.

Level 1 of the study averaged about 196 minutes of low-level activity per day. In other words, throughout a 24 hour period, this group moved for just over 3 hours a day, which means they were not moving the remaining 21 hours. Level 4, on the other hand, showed an average of 380 minutes of low-level movement per day, or just over 6 hours of movement.

The difference in risk of cardiovascular disease-related events (heart attacks and such) was about 22%. In other words, those people who simply got up and moved for about 6 hours throughout the day saw a 22% reduction in risk of cardiovascular disease-related events. That’s pretty significant considering we’re talking about simply getting out of the chair every once and a while.

To quote another study, which showed the relationship between cardiorespiratory fitness and all-cause mortality (AKA dying from anything):

Cardiorespiratory fitness is inversely associated with long-term mortality with no observed upper limit of benefit. Extremely high aerobic fitness was associated with the greatest survival and was associated with benefit in older patients and those with hypertension. Cardiorespiratory fitness is a modifiable indicator of long-term mortality, and health care professionals should encourage patients to achieve and maintain high levels of fitness.

In case you weren’t sure, inversely related means that, as you increase your cardio fitness, your risk of mortality decreases, and this relationship doesn’t change at any level of fitness.

How to Properly Increase Your Physical Fitness If You’re Starting From Scratch

While it would be contradicting for me to tell you that you don’t need to incorporate regular exercise into your life, these studies suggest that you can certainly benefit from much lower levels of activity than we previously thought. While I strongly believe in the power of regular exercise, let’s look at some ways you can start to improve your physical fitness while your deciding which workout regimen to start.

#1) Start your day off right with your Morning Movement Ritual

Tell me if this sounds familiar: in the morning, your alarm clock goes off and, after hitting the snooze button 5 times, you frantically get out of bed, get dressed, brush your teeth, slam down some coffee, and hustle out the door to work? Okay, maybe your routine is slightly different. However, this isn’t a far cry from what most people’s morning “routine” looks like.

Instead, try building in some time for you to move your body and get it prepped and ready for the day. I call this your Morning Movement Ritual, or MMR. The purpose of your MMR is start your day by mobilizing the joints of the body and getting the blood flowing so that you slowly wake up your nervous system.

While I won’t go in-depth on MMR development, because you can find complete articles on the site, here’s a basic layout: pick a combination of 4 to 6 mobility and bodyweight exercises. Choose a number of reps or a certain time to perform each one. And BAM, there’s your MMR. Like a said, it’s a bit more in-depth than this. However, simply performing 6 exercises each morning will go a long way in improving your health and physical fitness (not to mention your daily energy, productivity, and pain reduction).

#2) Move regularly throughout the day with your Movement Hygiene Practice

This is another idea I came up with while trying to figure out how to fit regular movement into my day. While this is nothing terribly groundbreaking, your Movement Hygiene Practice, or MHP, is simply the practice of getting up and moving around on a regular basis throughout the day.

Again, I’ve talked extensively on this topic, so I won’t go too deep here. However, the basic idea of the MHP sits behind a 25 minute timer. The idea of 25 minutes comes from a technique called the Pomodoro Technique. Originally used as a productivity tool, this technique was developed by Francesco Cirillo. The idea is simply to break your tasks into 25 minute chunks, as the mind only has the capability to optimally focus for about this amount of time.

So, instead of simply setting the timer 25 minutes as a reset for your brain, the MHP utilizes this time to reset the body as well. For your MHP, pick an exercise that you like to do. Maybe it’s planks or pushups or squats or running in place. Next, pick an amount of time or a number of reps to complete for your exercise.

For instance, if you like to do planks, maybe you want do them for 30 seconds. Then, set a timer to go off every 25 minutes throughout your entire work day. When your timer goes off, get up and complete your exercise. In our example, you would do a 30 second plank every 25 minutes.

#3) When you’re ready to get into workouts, hire a quality Coach or Personal Trainer

This last point can’t be overstated enough. We all like to believe that we can do things on our own. However, when it comes to improving our health and fitness, as a society, we’ve proven over and over again that we are exceedingly poor at making this happen. Now, this isn’t a judgment on you or your abilities as a human being. As I’ve stated before, much of this has to do with the social norms we’ve developed around what it takes to become fit and healthy.

So, for your body’s sake and your sanity’s sake, when you’re ready to get into regular workouts, find a quality coach or personal trainer to help you along the way. This will be the best investment you’ve had in a long time because, as a quality coach, they will be able to start your program where you are and progress your program according to your abilities.

This is an absolute no brainer in my book. Yes, I understand that I own a facility that is based around group training. However, I also worked in a regular fitness center for the first 7 years of my personal training career. And over those 7 years, 90% of the people I saw on a regular basis never made any progress. Not because they weren’t there. But because they never changed their program and never tried anything outside of the norm.

So, as you start to look at your goals for 2020 and you think about improving your health and fitness, take these strategies into account. As a matter of fact, even if you’re already working out on a regular basis, you still need to implement the MMR and MHP for optimal health and vitality. Otherwise, you will definitely be cutting yourself short and fighting an uphill battle against your physical fitness.