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Are Short Workouts a Waste of Time?
Are Short Workouts a Waste of Time?
by Martica Heaner, M.A., M.Ed., for MSN Health & Fitness  | *
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Q: I'm an overweight 30-year-old mom (5 foot 4 and 160 pounds). I try to burn at least 300 calories by running two to three miles on the treadmill every day. This takes 20 to 30 minutes. When I'm pushed for time, I run faster to burn the 300 calories. But then my fast workouts fall short of the 30-minute exercise recommendations, and both workouts are way less than the 60 to 90 minutes needed for weight loss. I don't have extra time since I'm taking care of my kids and husband while attending college. If I don't meet the minimum minutes, is all my running in vain?
A: Absolutely not. You don't mention how long you've been following this program, but the fact that you are consistent and stick to it every day is a very important factor in whether this workout is enough to help you lose weight.
You are clearly aware of the various exercise recommendations to aim for:
- The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) recommends that people in shape burn 300 to 400 calories per day from physical activity and/or exercise. (A beginning exerciser is advised to aim for 150 calories per day or more, and work up.)
- To achieve this calorie burn, or energy expenditure, people should accumulate 30 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity throughout the day. Research shows that fitness and overall health can be improved from this minimum.
- The Institute of Medicine and the USDA Dietary Guidelines, however, say that to achieve not just health benefits but weight control, the amount of daily physical activity should be extended to a total of 60 to 90 minutes.
Before you get bogged down in confusing and seemingly contradictory fitness prescriptions, take a second to understand what they are based on.
Every time you are active, you burn more calories, challenge yourself to become fitter and improve your health and lifespan. Whether you achieve some or all of these benefits depends upon what type of exercise you do, how intensely you perform it and for how long.
Any movement at all has been shown to have health benefits. So, a short stroll to the store, doing some housework and an all-out tough workout are all great. Of course, the more you move and the harder you work, the better. But, generally, research has shown that accumulating 30 minutes of movement throughout your day is enough to make you healthier than if you remained a couch potato.
Getting fitter requires a bit more effort. For this, you need to do a certain amount of moderate to vigorous movement to develop strength and stamina. This must be above and beyond what you normally do. So, a short stroll or cleaning the house won't cut it. Exercise needs to provide enough of a physical challenge that it* stimulates your body enough to trigger adaptations over time to handle the extra load. What exactly you need to do depends upon your specific fitness goal. But, generally, exercising at a moderate to vigorous intensity when doing either cardio or strength work can improve your physical fitness. If you work hard, you can decrease the time spent, because it's the volume of overload, not necessarily how long you do it, that provides the most effective stimulus. So, jumping rope or sprinting for five minutes every day, for example, can make your heart stronger than an easy walk for 15. (You should always warm up and cool down for a few minutes before and after such a vigorous activity.)
Losing weight is all about burning more calories. Excess fat is stored calories, so the more calories you burn, the more weight you lose. Every extra calorie you burn by being active is contributing to your losing weight.* The more intensely you move (exercising vigorously, for example), the more calories you burn (and the more physically fit your body becomes). You can also extend the amount of time you are moving to burn more calories. Or, as you have discovered, you can move at a slower pace for a longer period of time to burn the same amount of calories as you would if you moved faster for less time.
The 60- to 90-minute quotas reflect a target energy expenditure of burning 2,000 to 3,000 extra calories per week. Like other recommendations, these minutes moving or calories burned don't need to happen all at once. They can be accumulated throughout a day.
Part of the reason this recommendation seems daunting is that people don't realize how active they need to be. And in this era of motorized, TV-addicted, high-tech sedentary lives, the message is that we need to spend more time moving than sitting if we want to control our weight. Even though this is not welcome news, it's the truth. It's better to be informed than fall prey to misleading messages like those you hear on fitness infomercials promising miracle results in just three or five minutes of exercise a day.
Because you're trying to lose weight, I recommend setting exercise goals based on calories burned rather than minutes being active. For example, if you decided to do 60 minutes of exercise every day to lose weight and you signed up for a yoga or Pilates class for an hour every day. Well, you'd see some physical improvement, but probably not much weight loss because these types of workouts are generally low calorie burners (don't be fooled by the heated rooms that make you sweat and feel like you're burning lots of calories). On the other hand, if you cycled, walked or ran for 60 minutes, you'd burn many more calories—depending on your height and weight, you could burn up to 500 to 700 an hour.
Your 20- to 30-minute run is not reaching the 60-minute quota in that one workout. But because you are running, as opposed to walking, you are burning nearly as many calories in a half an hour jogging as you would in an hour walking. And even if you do less, you are still on the road to losing weight. It will just take longer.
And this where your discipline and consistency will pay off. Theoretically, if you could keep running and burn 300 calories per day, six days a week, over a year you could lose up to 27 pounds! So give it time and be patient, but stick to it. Your hard work will pay off!
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07-20-2006, 03:29 AM
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