For years, health guidelines have hammered home the same message: 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week is all it takes to keep your body in tip-top shape.
It’s a comfortable target that millions of us strive for, whether that means taking a brisk walk on your lunch break or hitting a couple of spin classes after work. However, a major new cardiovascular study has dropped a bit of a bombshell on that traditional advice. Researchers now warn that while that target is fine for general fitness, it falls completely short if you’re trying to slash your risk of serious cardiac issues. To give your heart the ultimate level of protection, you need to set your sights quite a bit higher than the old baseline.
Researchers say major heart protection appeared at much higher exercise levels.
A new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine found that adults needed somewhere between 560 and 610 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise per week to see the strongest reductions in cardiovascular risk. That works out to roughly nine to ten hours of activity a week, or around three to four times higher than the current minimum guideline. Researchers linked those higher exercise levels to substantially lower risks of heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, and atrial fibrillation.
The standard 150-minute target still helped, just not as dramatically.
People who met the current public health recommendation still saw cardiovascular benefits. The study linked the standard 150-minute target to an 8% to 9% reduction in cardiovascular risk. Researchers aren’t saying the current advice is useless or wrong. The bigger point is that the strongest reductions appeared in people doing far more activity than the minimum target currently recommended.
The study followed more than 17,000 adults over several years.
Researchers used data from over 17,000 participants from the UK Biobank study, with participants averaging around 57 years old. Instead of simply asking people how active they thought they were, researchers used wrist devices to track real movement levels over a seven-day period.
Participants were then followed for an average of nearly eight years afterwards. During that time, researchers recorded more than 1,200 cardiovascular events, including heart attacks, strokes, heart failure, and irregular heart rhythms.
The research also looked at something called VO2 max.
Researchers were especially interested in cardiorespiratory fitness, which is often measured through something called VO2 max. VO2 max measures how efficiently the body uses oxygen during exercise and is often considered one of the strongest indicators of overall cardiovascular fitness. People with higher VO2 max levels generally have hearts, lungs, and muscles that work together more efficiently during physical activity.
People with lower fitness levels appeared to need even more exercise.
One of the more surprising findings was that people starting from lower fitness levels often needed more exercise to reach the same level of heart protection as fitter individuals. For example, people with lower fitness needed noticeably more weekly activity to achieve the same risk reductions seen in highly fit participants. Researchers say this highlights how much harder the body may have to work when cardiovascular fitness is already low.
The study focused on moderate to vigorous exercise.
The activity measured in the study included things like brisk walking, running, cycling, and other exercise that noticeably raises heart rate. Researchers were specifically looking at moderate to vigorous activity, rather than lighter movement around the house or casual daily tasks. That distinction matters because exercise intensity appeared closely linked to the level of protection people gained.
The findings challenge the idea of one-size-fits-all exercise advice.
Researchers say future guidelines may eventually move towards more personalised recommendations based on someone’s current fitness level. At the moment, public health advice tends to give everyone the same broad weekly target regardless of age, fitness, or cardiovascular condition. However, this research suggests different people may need different exercise volumes to achieve similar levels of protection.
Researchers also stressed the study has important limitations.
Source: Unsplash Because the research was observational, it cannot fully prove direct cause and effect. Researchers also acknowledged that participants in the study may have been healthier or more active than the general population to begin with. They also didn’t fully measure things like sedentary behaviour, lighter activity, or long-term changes in fitness after the initial monitoring period.
The findings are still likely to surprise a lot of people.
Source: Unsplash For years, 150 minutes a week has been presented almost like the gold standard for exercise and heart health, so hearing that the biggest reductions in cardiovascular risk may happen closer to 600 minutes a week will probably sound overwhelming to many people. However, researchers say the current guidelines were always intended as a minimum target for basic protection, not necessarily the point where benefits stop increasing.
The bigger message may simply be that the body keeps responding to more movement.
The study doesn’t suggest people have failed if they’re not exercising for 10 hours every week. Any movement is still considered far better than none, but the findings do add to growing evidence that the body may continue gaining cardiovascular benefits well beyond the current minimum recommendations. And honestly, it’s another reminder that the official exercise target was probably never meant to be the finish line.
