Given this, the reality is that, for most people, the best amount of exercise to get is the amount they can practically sustain. Running every day is great, but if you can\u2019t do that, walking is good too, and it\u2019s a lot better than doing nothing.<\/p>\n
Even if, practically speaking, the best exercise routine is the one you can comfortably stick with, I find this hand-waviness unsatisfying. Clearly, exercise is important. But how important?<\/p>\n
Quantity matters. Something that improves your life by 0.1% is maybe a rounding error\u2014you could make the case for it, but it isn\u2019t a big deal. Something that improves your life by 50% or 100% is very important. To ignore such a big potential improvement is insanely wasteful.<\/p>\n
Fortunately, we can do a lot better than hand-waving. We can determine not only how much exercise is optimal for health, but also give some sense of what would be ideal for you personally\u2014given how much you actually enjoy exercising.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s the Optimal Amount of Exercise for Health?<\/h2>\n
Arem and colleagues<\/a> pooled together data from over 600,000 people and found the following curve showing the relationship between amount of exercise and all-cause mortality:<\/p>\n There are a few things to note about this curve:<\/p>\n First, it shows diminishing returns.<\/strong> That means going from zero to one hour of exercise per week is much more advantageous than going from one hour to two hours of exercise per week. Getting more exercise matters most when you do it the least.<\/p>\n Second<\/strong>, benefits appear to plateau.<\/strong> At around five times the standard guidelines, the benefits of additional exercise appear to be completely flat. Meaning if you\u2019re getting 750 minutes of moderate (or 375 minutes of vigorous) physical activity per week, adding more exercise isn\u2019t associated with better health outcomes.<\/p>\n This is a lot of exercise. If we consider vigorous exercise to be running and moderate exercise to be a brisk walk (or, more likely if you\u2019re getting this amount of exercise, a jog), this is the equivalent of running nearly an hour every day, or briskly walking for nearly two hours every day. Chances are, if you\u2019re getting this much exercise, you\u2019re doing it for reasons other than health.<\/p>\n Third, there\u2019s some uncertainty as to whether the benefits merely flatten or if they actually become negative beyond this point.<\/strong> Directionally, it looks like the curve may bend backwards. In other words, once you reach the training volume of ultramarathoners and beyond, your health may actually get worse.<\/p>\n However, this is a bit misleading. There are so few people at such an extreme that the confidence intervals become broad, and we have less certainty in the measurement. It may be that exercising that much is unhealthy for you. But, as the study authors point out, we don\u2019t actually know if this is true. All of this is to say is that even amounts of exercise that look extreme to a normal person aren\u2019t clearly worse for health than the optimum amount, and it\u2019s probably still healthier than the amount most of us typically get.<\/p>\n So, based on these data, the absolute best amount of exercise for human health is probably in the range of 3-5x the standard guidelines.<\/p>\n The problem with this analysis is that it ignores tradeoffs. Unless you\u2019re Bryan Johnson<\/a>, you value things other than living as long as possible. How do you compare the value of an extra month of life to, say, greater professional success, deeper friendships or watching more sunsets?<\/p>\n I don\u2019t pretend to be able to resolve the incommensurability of values in a human life. But we can make the analysis tractable if we ask a different question: how much do you value the time spent exercising, compared to the average value of the time\/activities that exercise would replace?<\/p>\n Since a major reason to exercise is to live longer, we can consider this as a kind of trade-off. You exercise now, giving up something else you would have done in that time. But, as a consequence, you now live longer (on average), so you regain some of that time over the course of your life.<\/p>\n Considering this role of trade-offs, a better analysis would look at how much \u201clife\u201d you gain for each incremental bit of added physical activity, and then subtract from it however much less the exercise was worth to you than the next best use of your time.<\/p>\n This is a little tricky. Arem used hazard ratios<\/a>, not \u201cyears of life gained\u201d, so without knowing the baseline survival rates of the population studied, we can\u2019t easily estimate it. Luckily, an earlier paper by Moore and colleagues<\/a> did this calculation for us, albeit using a more limited data set.<\/p>\n With a little math<\/span>1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>, we can convert Arem\u2019s hazard ratios into years of extra life gained, using the Moore paper as an anchor:<\/p>\n We need to convert this into a graph that shows the additional benefit for additional exercise:<\/span>2<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n On this graph, we can superimpose the \u201ccosts\u201d of exercise. Evaluating the costs is tricky, because it depends on how much you intrinsically value (or hate) the experience of exercise.\u2028\u2028<\/p>\n You could imagine that exercise is purely instrumental\u2014a means to an end. If someone waved a magic wand that let you get the benefits of exercise, but rendered you completely unconscious for the duration of the experience with no memories, you\u2019d be indifferent to it.\u2028\u2028<\/p>\n In this scenario, exercise is pure experiential waste that we only do for the benefits. Under this assumption, the optimal point of exercise is between 225 and 375 minutes per week.<\/p>\n You can also scale this by how much you hate or enjoy exercise. Below, I\u2019ve drawn graphs which consider the possibility that your time spent exercising is 80% as intrinsically valuable as your next-best alternative, in which case the optimal point is between 375 and 625 minutes per week.<\/p>\n I\u2019ve also considered the opposite case, where exercise has negative intrinsic value, such that you\u2019d rather give up an hour of time in your life to avoid thirty minutes of exercise. In this case, the optimal point lies between 75 and 225 minutes per week (although closer to the latter).<\/p>\n What we can see from this analysis is that the amount of exercise people typically get is only \u201crational\u201d if we imagine that they really, really<\/em> hate exercise. For instance, going from zero to a little bit of exercise is associated with roughly six times the increase in lifespan compared to the time cost of the exercise itself. That means you\u2019d have to prefer losing nearly three and a half hours of your total lifespan for every thirty minutes spent exercising for this to be a rational choice!<\/p>\n I don\u2019t know about you, but that seems pretty strong to me. Even for activities I hate, like getting a cavity filled at the dentist, I\u2019m not sure I would actively give up much more than twice the amount of equivalent life experiences.<\/p>\n An additional wrinkle is that I\u2019m assuming your exercise is moderate intensity. For a lot of people this is equivalent to brisk walking or a slow jog. For vigorous activity, the standard efficiency is roughly twice that, so this applies a fortiori<\/em>. <\/span>3<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n One quibble might be that this analysis weights present moments equally with ones experienced in the far future. I think it\u2019s a justifiable assumption.<\/p>\n When we consider financial decisions, we often use a discount rate<\/a> to reduce the value of money in the far future. But I\u2019m not sure that\u2019s justified here, for a few reasons:<\/p>\n Of course, it\u2019s obvious that the fact that many of the benefits of exercising accrue in the far future while the costs of exercising are immediate does<\/em> impact people\u2019s decision making, as it does with other prudent behaviors like saving for retirement, not drinking or smoking excessively and so on. But that imprudence is usually irrational.<\/span>4<\/sup><\/a><\/span><\/p>\n Exercise is a good example here, but it\u2019s hardly unique. Life is full of actions that can dramatically increase the quality (or quantity) of our lives compared to their costs, but which we often have a hard time adopting or sustaining.<\/p>\n We often blame lack of information, weakness of willpower, or personal preferences as reasons we fail to capture all this low-hanging fruit.<\/p>\n \u2028But I tend to think the problem is more than that. Cognitively speaking, exercise belongs to a class of problems that we do not have good built-in mechanisms for solving. And thus, to successfully stick to an exercise routine year after year and reap the benefits requires constructing systems, habits, beliefs and attitudes that make up for where our instincts fail us.<\/p>\n There are many ways to cultivate such systems, but the basic ingredient in all of them is a certain degree of committed focus, at least for a time. Spend a little bit of time creating the system, refining and stabilizing it, and it will continue to deliver benefits throughout your entire life.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.scotthyoung.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/How-much-exercise2.jpg\")
<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nBut is the Optimal for Health Actually Best for You?<\/h2>\n
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<\/figure>\n<\/div>\nWhat if You Want to Live Slow and Die Young?<\/h2>\n
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If Exercise Matters So Much, Why Do We Struggle With It?<\/h2>\n