It’s Possible to Improve Your Health with 15-Minute Workouts
As noted above, fifteen-minute exercise sessions can be enough to help you boost your health and fitness. Studies have also shown that there is a point of diminishing returns when exercising. In other words, the longer you exercise in a given session, the less your health will continue to improve for each additional minute you spend working out.
For some individuals, exercise (not just improving one’s health) becomes the goal in and of itself. Someone who diligently trains for a marathon by running 60 miles per week isn’t necessarily going to be doing significantly more for their baseline health than someone who logs 15-20 miles per week (all other things being equal). Rather, the 60-mile per week runner is putting in more miles in order to improve their athletic performance.
But along with that additional exercise time comes an increasing likelihood of injury. Too much exercise can even have the effect of lowering an athlete’s resistance and weakening their immune system, making them more susceptible to things like colds and sinus infections.
Ultimately your exercise and workout plan should be a direct consequence of the goals you set for yourself. The law of diminishing returns appears to be most relevant when it comes to individuals who are looking to improve their baseline health or to increase life expectancy. (http://myfitnessnut.com/mednews3)
Sometimes Less is More
While there is some disagreement within the scientific community as to what’s the minimum amount of exercise you can do to get the greatest health benefits, it’s clear that 15-minute fitness routines can give the majority of the benefits of physical exercise, but at a lower risk of injury. In fact, one of the most important steps you can take in order to improve your overall health is simply just to move your body a little more. That’s because simply sitting too much is an emerging threat to the long-term health?
Studies have shown that somewhere between 50% and 70% of us spend at least six hours a day sitting down (http://myfitnessnut.com/mednews4).
It can get to be a bit of a vicious cycle. By spending so much time sitting, our lower backs and necks and knees fall into such a state of disrepair and atrophy that it can start to hurt when we spend time on our feet. This tends to make us sit more, which we interpret as being something of a relief – when in fact it’s actually bad for our bodies.
Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the biggest factors in this setting time is the television – somewhere between 20% and 30% of us spend four or more hours a day watching television. The reason television can be such a negative contributor to health is that sometimes when we sit to watch TV, we find ourselves glued to the couch for our favorite easy chair and stay there for hours on end.
The problems that arise from spending too much time in the state of physical activity have gotten so bad that many doctors have begun using the term “sitting disease” to describe it.
Let’s be blunt; the alternative we’re discussing in this report is working out for 15 minutes at a time. We’re not talking about having to make a monumental shift in your lifestyle, or cut out your favorite leisure time activities. So even if you have never enjoyed exercise in the past, 15 minutes should still be something you can commit to without too much discomfort.
And who knows, eventually you may even come to like it!
