What is time? Ask a Buddhist monk, a prison inmate serving life, or a conductor on Germany’s national railway, and you can expect some interesting answers.
Your heart, lungs and blood vessels will be thankful for the respite from a daily onslaught of polluting factors- Matthew Muscat Inglott
Some say it doesn’t exist. It is a mind-made perception enabling us to make sense of a mysterious universe we have yet to fully understand. Others say it is the most valuable commodity imaginable, our most precious resource. We might at times feel we have too much of it, and at others not nearly enough.
Whichever way you see it, whether boiling an egg, studying or training for a new job, or saving to buy a house, anything worth having requires investment of time. What about all the beautiful gifts awaiting you once you decide to practise a more active lifestyle? We’ve all heard it before: “You should start exercising, join a gym, get in shape.”
Sure, there are plenty of benefits but for those of us without masochistic tendencies, what’s the catch? What’s the investment? How much time?
Ask several relevant professionals how much exercise you need, and you might get several different answers. If you are not interested in competitive sporting glory, but rather in better health, fitness and a more aesthetically pleasing appearance, how much time do you really need?
Let’s see what the experts have to say.
The magic number is 150. That’s the number of minutes you will need to spend being active throughout the week to enjoy better aerobic fitness and improved cardiovascular health. Your heart, lungs and blood vessels will be thankful for the respite from a daily onslaught of polluting factors, including chemically-rich, high-fat and sugary foods. They will become more efficient and better able to support us through our day, whatever physical and emotional demands confront us.
Add to this 150 minutes another two short sessions per week consisting of strength training exercises to build and tone the major muscle groups of your body, and you may consider yourself in line with international recommendations for a healthy life free of avoidable inactivity-related medical problems.
The World Health Organisation now recommends 150 minutes, as do recognised authorities in most Western nations, includ-ing the National Health Service in the UK, the American Heart Association and US Department of Health and Human Services, as well as the American College of Sports Medicine, a major player in the international fitness industry.
Those classified as overweight or obese should increase this tally, but to no more than double.
But what exactly are we to spend these 150 minutes doing, and how are we to spread them across our week?
We must engage in physical activity of moderate intensity, which could mean different things to different people. Consider a buff Johnny Bravo-inspired fitness freak sprinting a mile on the treadmill, bench pressing a new gym record for 100 repetitions and finishing off with the abdominal curl machine on full weight adjustment for another 100.
All of this without breaking a sweat or misplacing a single strand of painstakingly styled hair, smiling all the way, and stopping just in time to charm and delight a gym full of admiring women with a quick double biceps pose in front of the mirror.
OK, luckily none of us have ever seen this man, but he does illustrate a crucial point about intensity; the fitter you are, the more you can handle, so what specifically constitutes moderate activity all depends on how fit you are.
If you are the polar opposite of our friendly fitness freak and rarely, if ever, perform any sort of physical activity whatsoever, then walking even at a slow pace would be moderately to highly intense. Scaling a flight of stairs for some people may represent the equivalent to scaling Mount Kilimanjaro for others.
So in practical terms, we may define moderate as the level at which you can still hold a normal conversation if you were training with a partner. If you can’t talk comfortably, then that’s not moderate intensity, it’s high. If on the other hand you are able to sing, then it’s too low.
For most people, a brisk walk would represent a moderate-intensity workout. So would dancing, or engaging in a leisurely game of five-a-side soccer, volleyball, tennis, or squash. If you are fiercely competitive, then such sports would border on high intensity (unable to talk). Those of intermediate to advanced level fitness who are able to exercise this intensely may decrease the recommended total tally to 75 minutes per week.
Now that we know what sort of exercise we should be shooting for, how do we spread our 150 minutes? A study at a Danish university published in the American Journal of Physiology this summer remarkably showed that working out for half an hour actually resulted in more fat loss than working out for a full hour. The amount of fat loss simply did not correspond to the calorie-expenditure calculations made by the researchers. Over 13 weeks, the group of participants who engaged in 30 minutes per day lost an average of 3.6kg, while the one-hour group lost 2.7kg. Other studies continue to show that in exercise terms, less duration can often mean more, so avoid breaking your 150 down into chunks any longer than 30, and focus on maintaining that moderate intensity throughout using the talk/sing test.
If 30 minutes a day is too much, you can break it down further into three chunks of 10 per day; two brisk walks and a game.
Can you manage that?
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