Question:
If I do 30 minutes of cardio exercise six days a week, would increasing it to 60 minutes a day be twice as good for me?
Answer:
If you’re asking whether doubling exercise time doubles the health benefits, then, by most indications, it does not — though it does increase them slightly.
In a notable study from 2011, people of all ages who exercised very moderately, for about 15 minutes a day, or approximately half of your current regimen, reduced their risk of dying prematurely by about 14 percent, or the equivalent of three additional years of life.
Those whose workouts were twice as long — like yours, 30 minutes per day — saw an additional drop in the risk of premature death, but only by 4 percent. Using that data, other scientists have estimated that people who go really big with their workouts, increasing their exercise time from 50 minutes per day to 120 minutes per day — a 140 percent increase — achieve only about a 5 percent added decrease in their risk of dying too young.
Exercise beyond a certain level may even be counterproductive. When researchers tracked 52,000 adults for 15 years, those who ran 5 to 20 miles a week at a fairly pokey pace of about 9 to 10 minutes a mile received the optimal mortality benefits, the study authors write. The fastest runners and those who completed the most miles every week did not live significantly longer, on average, than people who didn’t run at all.
In other words, you are probably doing the ideal amount of exercise, if your goal is to live to be 82. According to Dr. James O’Keefe, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., and an author of studies of runners, ‘‘Although jogging for 90 minutes per week would be ridiculously inadequate for the athlete with aspirations to win a gold medal in the marathon at the Rio Olympics in 2016, it might be just what the doctor ordered for a person aiming to be alive and well as part of the crowd at the 2048 Olympics.”
Answer:
If you’re asking whether doubling exercise time doubles the health benefits, then, by most indications, it does not — though it does increase them slightly.
In a notable study from 2011, people of all ages who exercised very moderately, for about 15 minutes a day, or approximately half of your current regimen, reduced their risk of dying prematurely by about 14 percent, or the equivalent of three additional years of life.
Those whose workouts were twice as long — like yours, 30 minutes per day — saw an additional drop in the risk of premature death, but only by 4 percent. Using that data, other scientists have estimated that people who go really big with their workouts, increasing their exercise time from 50 minutes per day to 120 minutes per day — a 140 percent increase — achieve only about a 5 percent added decrease in their risk of dying too young.
Exercise beyond a certain level may even be counterproductive. When researchers tracked 52,000 adults for 15 years, those who ran 5 to 20 miles a week at a fairly pokey pace of about 9 to 10 minutes a mile received the optimal mortality benefits, the study authors write. The fastest runners and those who completed the most miles every week did not live significantly longer, on average, than people who didn’t run at all.
In other words, you are probably doing the ideal amount of exercise, if your goal is to live to be 82. According to Dr. James O’Keefe, a cardiologist at St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, Mo., and an author of studies of runners, ‘‘Although jogging for 90 minutes per week would be ridiculously inadequate for the athlete with aspirations to win a gold medal in the marathon at the Rio Olympics in 2016, it might be just what the doctor ordered for a person aiming to be alive and well as part of the crowd at the 2048 Olympics.”
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