
How Little Exercise Can You Get Away With? - robg
http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/30/phys-ed-how-much-exercise-to-avoid-feeling-gloomy/?ref=magazine
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bootload
_"... You do not necessarily have to divide your exercise time into daily
allotments, either. Existing “scientific evidence does not allow researchers
to say, for example, whether the health benefits of 30 minutes on five days a
week are any different from the health benefits of 50 minutes on three days a
week,” according to the activity guidelines. Do what suits your schedule.
..."_

Minimum for mental health, not physical health and doesn't take into account
is the way people work very well. If you do lots of little bits of _"regular"_
exercise it adds up. Leave a time interval and it _"appears"_ to get harder to
do the next time. I found this last year trying to see exactly why it's easy
to fail doing hard things. By breaking the hard thing into little irregular
steps and repeat them at fixed regular intervals there is less chance of
failure.

The fail point is right around the time you start to do a hard task after an
idle period. Take a break and things appear harder than they are. The amount
of motivation energy is high. Do things regularly and the energy barrier seems
lower. I found this out the hard way trying to see how far I could push myself
without cracking or failing. My target last year was 1000 miles.

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petercooper
20 minutes per week for reasonable mental health? Looks like I need to pick up
my pace a little.. :-)

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jrp
More about METs and tradeoffs between minutes exercised and intensity of
exercise:

<http://www.health.gov/paguidelines/guidelines/Appendix1.aspx>

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keefe
Title is a bit misleading - sure 20 min a day may be fine for achieving some
milestone, but the bottom line is that our bodies are machines that are not
meant to be sedentary!!! at the very least, 1 lb of fat = 3200 calories and we
should not be walking around with whole people of fat tied to our guts

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Daniel_Newby
Causality FAIL. They even have the unmitigated gall to talk about a "dose-
response" relationship for what is a _purely observational_ study.

