Research reveals that cardio workouts for health benefits are no longer limited to the minimum 30 minutes of continuous physical activity. It’s beenanita-skip-rope2 proven that exercise can be broken into 10 minute bouts repeated throughout the day and be just as effective. However, people often overlook the most important factor underlying this health message; the intensity of the exercise that you are performing determines the health benefits that you will gain. Therefore, there is a minimum threshold that must be reached within these 10-minute bouts for any benefit to occur.

What Doesn’t Work

For instance, 10 minutes of continuous walking on the treadmill may not raise your heart rate high enough or burn as many calories as your cardio machine suggests, especially if your body is accustomed to walking.

This applies to the various messages that we are given about taking the stairs at work, parking the car further away from your worksite or standing up or have walking meetings with clients. Although these actions are better than staying sedentary, they are often well below the threshold needed to prevent disease. Don’t cheat yourself by thinking you’ve reached your daily exercise requirement if you haven’t truly challenged your body with an appropriate intensity.

If building endurance is the goal, you will not achieve this through 10 minute bouts alone. You will need to increase the time portion of you exercise routine so that your body becomes accustomed to a longer workload and greater stress.

What Do We Suggest?

If you only have 10 minutes, high intensity intervals utilizing large muscle groups followed by short recovery intervals are shown to be effective at reaching a health benefit threshold. You should feel a significant increase in your heart rate, need time to catch your breath and your muscles should be tired. Remember to repeat these intervals to achieve 30 minutes a day.

by Becky Smith

Becky Smith is a Bachelor of Kinesiology graduate and certified with the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology as a Certified Exercise Physiologist. She specializes in water rehabilitation and enjoys using the pool as a way to challenge her clients. She works with a variety of clientele both in the water and in the Fitness Centre.