If you only exercise once or twice a week, a study has shown that it can help reduce the risk of heart disease just as much as exercising regularly throughout the week.
The pressure of daily work makes it difficult for many people to find time for exercise each week. However, research suggests that even small amounts of exercise are beneficial for the body.
There’s no doubt that exercise is essential for a healthy heart. Regular exercise helps lower blood pressure and cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart disease or stroke. But sometimes, finding the time and motivation to exercise can be difficult. So, what is the minimum amount of exercise that will benefit your body? The answer depends on your current fitness level.
If you are not very fit, you can get big benefits from less exercise. If you are completely sedentary, even a small amount of exercise can reduce your risk of heart disease. If you start with almost no exercise, one to two hours of light cycling or brisk walking per week can reduce your risk of dying from heart disease by up to 20%.
A sedentary person who does no physical activity will see benefits from just two hours of exercise per week. If they increase their exercise to four hours per week, they will see some additional benefits (about 10%). However, the heart benefits level off after exercising four to six hours per week, and no further benefits are gained.
However, one study found that when sedentary people were trained for long-duration events like marathons, exercising seven to nine hours per week significantly changed the structure of their hearts. This type of training provided the same benefits as exercising four to six hours per week, but the participants’ heart muscles grew and the chambers of the heart enlarged. The heart, like any other muscle, grows if it is trained enough. These changes were seen in just three months.
Therefore, while additional hours of exercise do not provide any additional benefits in reducing the risk of heart disease, these structural changes in the heart will improve your fitness – and hopefully, you’ll be able to complete a marathon faster.
These kinds of changes were previously thought to be possible only in experienced athletes, but this research shows that if we are willing to make time for ourselves, we can not only reap the benefits of heart health but also develop a heart as strong as an athlete’s.
If you want to get the most benefit in reducing your risk of heart disease, you’ll need to break a sweat. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is one method that can help you get the most out of your workouts.
It’s typically a 20-minute workout where you do intense exercise for 30 to 60 seconds, followed by a period of rest.
If you find it difficult to find time to exercise during the week and can only exercise on weekends, don’t worry; it’s still beneficial. Although these workouts are shorter in duration, due to the intensity of the exercise, you can see benefits like reduced blood pressure and cholesterol within a few weeks. However, most HIIT studies have had such small sample sizes that the effect on general heart disease risk has not been reviewed.
If you have heart disease, certain conditions make it unwise to do vigorous exercise. For example, cardiomyopathy (genetic heart muscle disease), ischaemic heart disease (narrowing of the heart’s arteries), and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart, usually viral). In these conditions, low- or moderate-intensity exercise should be done. This will benefit your heart and not pose a risk.
In conclusion, even if you only exercise once or twice a week, a study has shown that it can help reduce the risk of heart disease just as much as exercising regularly throughout the week. So, if you’re lazy and want to improve your heart health, remember: any amount of exercise can have a big impact on your heart.