560-610 minutes of exercise a week needed for substantial heart benefits

https://bmjgroup.com/560-610-minutes-of-exercise-a-week-needed-for-substantial-heart-benefits/

by stevenwoo • 2 months ago

50 104 2 months ago

stevenwoo• 2 months ago

This is a change from the prior roughly 150 minutes and looks to scale depending upon the subject's starting fitness - higher fitness can get by with less, lower fitness needs to hit the higher duration numbers.

pmarreck• 2 months ago

Cool, now combine this with being a parent of young kids in a 2-income family without any other assistance.

georgeecollins• 2 months ago

I wonder why this gets downvoted. Nowadays people are aware of what they sacrifice economically and physically when they have kids. It changes the incentives.

kaffekaka2• 2 months ago

People choose between staying physically fit or have kids? I find that hard to believe.

giwook5• 2 months ago

It's difficult but where there's a will there's a way. I know plenty of parents who find time to get exercise in. And even if you don't hit ~600 minutes in a week, any amount of exercise is beneficial.

Go for a run pushing your kids in the stroller (even more cardiovascular benefit than just running by itself tbh). Do a bunch of squats at home while cradling your toddler (it becomes funtime for them, like they're on a mini rollercoaster ride). Take your kids for a hike, whether they're tiny and need to be brought along in a baby carrier or they can walk by themselves.

Basically, you can make it happen if you really want it to happen.

InitialLastName• 2 months ago

Side benefit: Your kids grow up seeing you build habits that keep you healthy long-term. Eventually, they get involved and that helps them learn self-care skills.

Plus, going for a walk/run in the stroller with Dad has to be developmentally healthier than staring at a tablet on the couch.

sva_2• 2 months ago

I frequently see couples who have a baby buggy with big wheels that allows jogging. Or a trailer for the bike. Or a backpack where you can put a baby on top.

dec0dedab0de• 2 months ago

It's even easier with young kids, you just play with them. Once they get older and too cool it becomes a pain.

bryanlarsen3• 2 months ago

"Moderate exercise" is not a very high bar. Chores and playing with your kids probably count. There's a good chance you're already getting the required amount.

Tade0• 2 months ago

I have two kids and recently I started cycling to work. I can get maybe half the new recommended number on a good week. That apparently translates to a 20% reduction.

Upon reading the article:

The average age was 57 years and 56% were female and 96% were white.

My take is that all this study says is that's kind of late to try to tackle this problem in one's 50s. That being said it's nice to know that I could maybe get a 30% reduction if I were to start spitting my lungs out at this age doing 10h of intense cardio.

elevation• 2 months ago

Cool, now combine this with being a parent of young kids in a 2-income family without any other assistance.

For anyone literally in this situation: start small and consistent. Your goal is not to pencil in 10 hours a week of cardio. Instead, try to do 30 seconds of the same calisthenics exercise with your child before work/school consistently for 6 months. Perhaps pushups.

Over time you'll find the 30 seconds grows because you want it to. You might learn that warming up with jumping jacks helps you do pushups more comfortably. You might watch videos with your child about pushup variations and incorporate them into your routine together. Perhaps invest a few $$ into small equipment to support activities you're already doing, like pushup handles. Or maybe an over-the-door pullup bar.

Your routine won't be "optimal" in the 600 minutes sense, but a suboptimal routine that you do consistently is infinitely better for you than an ideal routine you don't, and it can expand/contract based on your needs.

Simulacra• 2 months ago

I think this would be tough for a lot of people ... that's 10 hours of exercise. I walk 5+ miles a day which takes me roughly an hour and a half. I'm only getting five to 7 hours.. Not sure I have the time in the day to add another three.

b0sk• 2 months ago

that's assuming you are walking at a fairly brisk pace.. the article says

560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity

lostmsu3• 2 months ago

At this rate you get more lifespan not exercising. 10h a week out of your waking time is about 9%. No way your heart health gonna give you that much.

giwook5• 2 months ago

Lifespan != healthspan

commandlinefan• 2 months ago

I don't know... If you're actually exercising an hour and a half each day, every day, you're going to be incurring some pretty regular exercise related injuries and degeneration. Your heart might like all that running, but your knees are going to make you regret it.

declan_roberts2• 2 months ago

The joke is that jogging will add years to your life, but you'll have spent those years jogging.

hyperpape• 2 months ago

Heart health isn't the only mechanism by which exercise could affect mortality.

SirMaster• 2 months ago

So do an exercise that you actually enjoy and want to be doing.

I play pickleball 10h a week and absolutely love the time spent playing. So there is no wasted time here. I spend all my exercise time doing something fun that I love doing, and it improves my health outcomes at the same time.

umvi• 2 months ago

That's like 90 minutes of exercise a day if you take zero rest days... Not happening for most people. I think even marathon training requires less than 90 minutes a day on average.

bitexploder2• 2 months ago

Moderate is not vigorous. They mean being active and walking, etc.

jerlam3• 2 months ago

The imprecise language in these studies often means people can interpret them in whatever way they want.

This study defines moderate as "brisk" walking, suggesting that it's not just walking.

Athletes live in their own bubble where "vigorous" means "maximal".

comrade1234• 2 months ago

A lot of this sounds very different than other studies that have said small amounts of exercise have substantial benefits.

I was always a little suspicious when they would say that you only need moderate exercise like walking because when you do vigorous exercise your blood vessels expand up to 3x diameter, keeping your arteries supple and elastic. You just don't get that by walking.

jimbokun4• 2 months ago

This study also shows a noticeable benefit from lower exercise levels, just not nearly as much as very high exercise levels.

crazyfingers2• 2 months ago

And many studies that show more exercise volume at high intensity is associated with higher MACE risk.

marricks• 2 months ago

Those adults who met the 150 minute a week guideline on exercise experienced a modest 8-9% reduction in cardiovascular risk

30%+ reduction from 10 hours a week of exercise sounds ideal, but 9% isn't nothing.

alsetmusic• 2 months ago

10 hours a week of exercise

Honestly, only a hypochondriac or a narcissist would consider 10h/w acceptable. Everyone is too busy trying to stay alive.

The number only makes sense if you're a body-builder or an influencer who trades on appearance.

ndr• 2 months ago

Evolution didn't spend millions of years so we could sit 8 hours a day and slouch through the rest.

bryanlarsen3• 2 months ago

10h/week of moderate exercise should be straight forward. moderate exercise includes stuff like cleaning and other chores, playing with your kids, walking to the corner store, et cetera.

syedkarim• 2 months ago

I don't think 10 hours per week is unreasonable or impossible. And I don't see why you need to be a hypochondriac or narcissist to prioritize physical activities. The article does not define the required level of exertion, but I assume things like biking, ping-pong/pickleball, soccer, etc all count. A lot of physical activity can be cheap, though it is more challenging in the winter.

bojan2• 2 months ago

Luckily because of the AI we'll all be able to do more in less time, so those 10 hours will be easy to find.

Jokes aside, 10 hours a week is quite something. Good that they mention that 2-3 hours is also already beneficial.

jimbokun4• 2 months ago

I’m honestly struggling to figure out how I would fit 2 hours of cardio into my daily routine.

nemomarx• 2 months ago

Up and down your stairs at home, walking to shops or work, or dedicated gym / biking / walk time before bed is basically it. If you have a tight schedule that can be very hard and if you live in the wrong type of housing it's also harder unfortunately

pimterry• 2 months ago

It's lower than it sounds: this time includes even relatively gentle exercise (a brisk walk) and although it's not explicit here most other uses of similar metrics I've seen generally count hard cardio minutes as 2x, e.g. the NHS guidelines (https://www.nhs.uk/live-well/exercise/physical-activity-guid...) this references are 150 mins moderate exercise or 75 mins vigorous.

JimDabell• 2 months ago

Two hours of cardio into your daily routine is ~40% higher than the upper bound suggested by the article.

A lot of people can get this level of exercise by walking or cycling to work. Even for those people that can’t, it’s something to consider the next time you are changing jobs or moving house.

dumbdumb1252• 2 months ago

There are multiple comprehensive umbrella reviews on the subject. Synthesis of knowledge synthesis. Tens of thousands of study subjects over decades and decades.

15 MET hours above 3 METs gain 70% of the possible benefits from cardio.

Not exactly contradictory results, but it makes this sound like bullshit.

jimbokun4• 2 months ago

What’s a MET hour?

nickburns4• 2 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metabolic_equivalent_of_task

dumbdumb1252• 2 months ago

MET is a measure of cardio exertion.

Walking briskly is 3. Moderate running is 6. These are just examples.

An hour spent at 3 MET is 3 MET hours.

Ronsenshi• 2 months ago

Important point is that study was done on participants with average age of 57. And by "substantial" benefit they mean reduction in cardiovascular events by 30% compared to around 10% for people who do 150 minutes of exercise a week.

I wonder if healthy diet also plays role in the outcome.

noelwelsh2• 2 months ago

Those adults who met the 150 minute a week guideline on exercise experienced a modest 8-9% reduction in cardiovascular risk, the study found. This was consistent across all levels of fitness.
In order to achieve substantial protection, classed as a greater than 30% risk reduction, between 560 and 610 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a week was needed.

So 30 minutes a day is still good, but more is better. Seems reasonable.

Also exercise doesn't mean planned / scheduled exercise, like going to the gym. Daily activities can count, like cycling to the train station for example. Which gets to one of my favorite hobby horses: increasing exercise at the population level is an urban design problem.

giwook5• 2 months ago

Urban design can help, but only for those who actually want to take the 'hard' route. Most people I know would rather take a subway or call an uber for anything above 20 minutes of walking (which makes me sad).

bojan2• 2 months ago

20 minutes of walking is a perfect bicycle distance.

jimbokun4• 2 months ago

Walking to subway station and from destination subway station to final destination is significantly more walking time than using a car from home to final destination.

volkk• 2 months ago

i think that's a chicken and egg cultural problem. build cities in a way where bicycles/walking is encouraged, then over time you'll have people that want to do exactly that.

bluefirebrand2• 2 months ago

I used to live in a very walkable part of Victoria BC, which was great! Unfortunately I was eventually priced out, and the job market there was very competitive so I had to move

I wound up in a fairly walkable part of Calgary. But Calgary is not a super walkable or bikeable city. Transit here is at best ok, and winter gets very cold. There are some good bike paths but you have to be pretty determined to use them when it snows or it's -40 out.

I guess what I'm saying is urban design is super important, but geography has a say too. We don't all get to live in the relatively mild west coast weather.

noelwelsh2• 2 months ago

The trick is to make the healthy option the easy route. That's what Paris did (creating more bike lanes, getting rid of parking spots, closing roads to cars) and cycling is now more popular than driving [1].

[1]: See, for example, https://bicyclenetwork.com.au/newsroom/2026/03/11/how-paris-...

toasty2283• 2 months ago

I got a group of 5 or so friends looking at me like I just came out of a spaceship when I told them me and my wife go for walks almost every evening for 30-60 min... walking for the sake of walking was truly alien to them.

skeeter20202• 2 months ago

example: Calgary is currently debating removal of the free fare zone for the DT transit line. It's like 10 blocks of straight, flat walking but you hear things like "nobody will go out for lunch and support downtown businesses if we get ride of this!" Currently it's mostly used by homeless people to stay warm in the winter.

jauntywundrkind• 2 months ago

I think ebikes are amazing but it is more than a bit sad to me that less than half the people moving around in my neighborhood put in any energy. There's like two bicyclists under 25. Many many many scooters and ebikes.

Very torn on this one. I love it for them, but also, it seems super sad to me. I can't even really explain why it's so saddening.

forgotusername6• 2 months ago

At certain times of day the London underground deliberately directs people to longer paths around the stations to alleviate congestion. This kind of thing could be a health benefit.

Fire-Dragon-DoL6• 2 months ago

9 hours of moderate to vigorous seems like a lot. When I do vigorous (2 times a week HIIT) I cannot do vigorous the next day, my body clearly needs recovery. I can do moderate. But I wonder what scientists mean by vigorous at this point. I am starting to suspect I set the bar too high

cameldrv• 2 months ago

I think the definition of vigorous is roughly 75% of max heart rate. HIIT would generally be more strenuous than that. Roughly speaking for a lot of people, running faster than about a 10:00/mi pace is probably vigorous.

In the WHO recommendations, they say to get 75 minutes of vigorous or 150 of moderate per week. I believe in this study they use the same double counting of vigorous minutes.

I’ve seen other studies that say you get most all of the cardio benefit you can with about 150m vigorous/300m moderate. You could roughly get that by running about 2.5 miles per day.

unglaublich• 2 months ago

Light and moderate are mostly just "activities of daily life" (walking, commuting), and vigorous is whenever you exercise explicitly (running, swimming, speed cycling, soccer, etc). So it's more like 9 hours of active movement, or 4.5 hours of exercise (40 mins a day).

readthenotes12• 2 months ago

"exercise doesn't mean planned / scheduled exercise, like going to the gym."

Most of the people I see in the gym are sitting on the benches on their phone 9 minutes out of 10. I'm pretty sure going to the gym is not helping at all...

nickburns4• 2 months ago

Calling it 'the gym' sort of conflates its two distinct sections: the one containing cardio equipment, and the other containing strength training/bodybuilding equipment. So-called 'work capacity' aside, there's almost zero overlap between the two sections.

Whether someone's effectively strength training/bodybuilding or not, which is the section I think you refer to—nobody reasonably believes that does anything significant for cardiovascular health, which is the topic being dicussed here.

mancerayder• 2 months ago

If you're doing heavy compound exercises like 3x5, 5x3 squats, you kind of need to wait three minutes in between! Even adding something in between like press or pullups is quite hard on the nervous system.

The people who walk 45m on the treadmill while watching a show, or people who sit around chit chatting, yes... A waste of space.

giwook5• 2 months ago

I'm not convinced.

I may be misunderstanding how the study was conducted, but it sounds like a more reasonable conclusion to draw from the study is that those who tend to have better health outcomes and longer healthspans/lifespans are the ones who also are willing to prioritize their health and physical fitness and are willing to spend this much time on exercise.

The average age of participants in the study was 57, so you're already narrowing in on a very specific and pretty narrow subset of the population when you're looking at seniors who are also spending 10 hours a week on exercise.

While 560-610 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity certainly helps, I'd think these are individuals who are generally abstaining from smoking, will try to eat healthy at least moderately often, stay away from overconsumption of fast food or alcohol, etc.

Basically, it sounds like there is a degree of correlation here between habits and outcomes that is being conflated with causation.

ianbooker• 2 months ago

Confounders are included and therefore controlled for, and causality can be assumed since the DV is an event/hazard. This is also the reason you end up with the seemingly high average...

declan_roberts2• 2 months ago

Combined with retatrutide or other GLP-1 agonist peptides and that number is probably significantly smaller.

stared• 2 months ago

Without a control group, correlation is not causation. So the opening sentence is misleading, exaggerated, or maybe even plain false:

Adults should aim to do between 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity to achieve a substantial reduction in the risk of heart attacks and stroke, suggest the findings of an observational study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

It is highly likely that healthier people exercise more (and the bedridden exercise way less). Also, who exercise more: people who care about their health in general, who don't overwork themselves, who have disposable time and income.

For example, an older person's walking pace is strongly correlated with their remaining life years. If we force these people to walk faster, they won't outrun death - we would very likely just increase their mortality.

jeffbee• 2 months ago

The headline relies entirely on the definition of "substantial". Anyway, the statistics and logic of the paper appear sound at first reading, but I'm interested in why they censored participants with cycling VO2(max) over 55 as "implausible".

Well, on second thought, a potential flaw of this analysis is that calculating MVPA from medical accelerometer data has a huge blind spot. Bicycling is invisible to those devices, as is any other activity that doesn't move your wrist, like leg presses.

solumos• 2 months ago

Adults should aim to do between 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity
Observational study

Can we stop doing this please?

bzmrgonz• 2 months ago

wow, that's a lot of time... I wonder if we can offset that time by doing one HIIT exercise a week. there's a group of people trying to crank up SPRINTING-SATURDAYS as a thing on youtube (sprintingproject). I like the idea because the body has 6 days to recover, there's no way to cause damage with 6 day recovery.

croes2• 2 months ago

How wealthy are those who have time to spend 10 hours on exercise?

zingababba• 2 months ago

I mean I get you are trying to imply this is some type of luxury but I've been exercising almost daily my entire life from when I was an unemployed teenager to now at 40yo making a respectable living. It has absolutely nothing to do with wealth. Hell during a rough spot in my life I was homeless for a week and was still working out daily. For me it's literally my anti-depressant.

What it honestly comes down to is people absolutely love to make excuses, simple as.

croes2• 2 months ago

Using yourself as sole data point is rather useless.

Time is a limiting factor and wealth often means more leasure time

https://www.fittechglobal.com/fit-tech-features/Research-Wea...

sva_2• 2 months ago

It makes me feel better about my cycling addiction. Although I wonder how healthy ultra distances are (cycling all day, which I frequently do on at least 1 day of the weekend)

oogabooga67• 2 months ago

So this study was on adults aged 40-69, over 8 years or so. And then they had 500k possible people, of which 200k or so had accelerometer data, and then 17k or so of those actually had done a vo2max test, which they admit might select for a slightly healthier population. I don't know if you can say much if anything close to the headline from looking at this data.

I guess the one interesting thing is that they only had accelerometer data, so i guess maybe this wouldnt undercount activity minutes the way my garmin does (i can do a lot before i cross 100bpm or whatever the threshold is).

It seems like a lot here depends on how you try to measure this activity. Garmin uses the hr mostly i think so basically most of my stepcount is ignored. Pure accelerometer data underrepresents resistance training and overrepresents relatively low energy fidgeting.

I feel like this is a garbage study tbh. Or a mid study with a garbage headline slapped on it.

josefritzishere• 2 months ago

9-10 hours seems like a lot. That's very discouraging.

roryirvine• 2 months ago

I'm genuinely surprised to read people saying this.

Walking, housework, gardening, etc are all classed as moderate for this purpose, whilst things like running or lifting weights are vigorous and count double.

So we're only talking about a couple of dedicated exercise sessions a week, on top of an hour of non-sedentary activities each a day.

crazyfingers2• 2 months ago

Dubious.

maxglute• 2 months ago

Method uses accelerometer data... how does that map to lifting, or seems like it doesn't it averages out rest time and lift itme

GeoAtreides• 2 months ago

people: oh noes who has time to exercise every day so hard so difficult

also people: 2h average a day doomscrolling on tiktok

burnt-resistor• 2 months ago

I guess I need to become a lumberjack now then. AI-resistant and exercise.

560-610 minutes of exercise a week needed for substantial heart benefits

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