How Often Should You Work Out?
The current guidelines from the US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) recommend that, per week, adults get 150 to 300 minutes of moderate physical activity, 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous physical activity, or an equivalent combination of the two. That breaks down to 2.5 to five hours of moderate-intensity activity (such as briskly walking or playing pickleball), and one hour and 15 minutes to 2.5 hours of vigorous activity (such as running or even shoveling snow). For context, if you did 30 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise a day, that would get you to 210 minutes for the week.
However, the HHS notes that you can certainly go above these recommendations and that more physical activity generally confers more health benefits, to a certain extent. In fact, a July 2022 study published in the American Heart Association’s journal, Circulation, found that people who worked out two to four times more than the minimum recommendation lived longer than those who didn’t move that much. But anyone who met the HHS guidelines benefitted significantly from reduced mortality risk. The study, which looked at 116,221 people over 30 years, found that more active people had a lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease, as well as any other cause.