New research about the importance of how often you exercise really caught my eye this week. It’s one of those instances where scientists worked very hard to create a solid, reliable study to get some quality results and all I can do is no and think “Yup, I could have told you that”. I think we’ve all had that feeling at some point. Scientists go to great lengths to prove something that we really have known all along. And yet, it still feels good to see it proven to a certain extent.
How Often You Exercise is What Decides How Effective It Is
So, here’s what sports science professor Ken Nosaka behind this study determined. Essentially, if you exercise a little bit every day, you’ll get way better results out of it than if you do one unbelievably intense session at the gym each week, using all the best equipment. It’s not how much you pour into one individual workout that is going to get you your outcomes. It’s getting off your butt and doing something on most days of the week.
How often you exercise is more important than how much you exercise in a given session. You’ll get far more health benefits out of going for a good walk most days of the week, completing at least one yoga session and a couple of brief strength training workouts will get you more wellness benefits than going to the gym once per week for an intense sweat session.
Cool Research to Confirm What We’ve Pretty Much Known
It’s great to know this for sure, but likely your doctor, your physical trainer, and anyone who has a lot of experience in fitness could have told you pretty much the same thing. If you’ve ever sought out the advice of any of these people, the odds are, you’ve already heard it too. How often you exercise really is key to keeping yourself fit, improving over time, and getting the health benefits it has to offer.
The study about how much you exercise was conducted across four weeks. It took place at Edith Cowan University (ECU) in Australia, as a part of a collab with Niigata University and Nishikyushu University in Japan. They studied three different groups of participants as they completed resistance exercises, then studied their outcomes.
The difference between how often you exercise and how much that they found that “just lowering a dumbbell slowly once or six times a day” produced greater benefits than long workout sessions at a gym.
All I can say to that is that now you know this, you really can’t say that you don’t have time to exercise!