Health benefits from exercise plateau after 150 minutes of moderate intensity or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise weekly. Endurance athletes often overtrain, risking injury and burnout. For fitness without high injury risk, try low-load strength training two to three times weekly for 25-45 minutes.
Chapters
How is your take on exercise changed from being a hardcore endurance athlete? How's that changed? Here's what you need to know. Here's what's important. If you look at actual data on exercise, you tend to see a law of diminishing returns when you exceed about 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or about 75 minutes of very vigorous high-intensity exercise per week. I think you can get sucked into this vicious cycle of beating your body down with too much of a focus on fitness, on endurance, because that's where where you're getting your pleasure. I think a more well-rounded life would involve some sports, you know, whatever— pickleball, tennis, golf, some walking, some art, some instrumentation, you know, music, a local community meetup, some service. Like, if you were going to choose a form of training that lends itself best to building strength and muscle with a low risk of injury, it's not going to turn you into an Olympic athlete. There's not a lot of power development involved with it, but super slow training— and I use this a lot with people who I'm training who are just like executive who just want to stay fit. They don't care about piling on slabs of muscle or being a pro football player. They just want to hit the gym and be able to do it and stay happy and injury-free. Super slow training, full body, 2 to 3 times a week. Typically you can get it done in anywhere from 25 to 45 minutes, and it's a pretty good workout.
