5 reasons to keep the bulk of your workouts easy
^ full buzzfeed on that title
First, the point of this post isn’t to demonize hard workouts or glorify being lazy, as I still aim to get 1-2 hard workouts in per week. It’s to explain that for most people’s goals of looking good, feeling good, and/or losing weight working out really hard can actually be counterproductive whereas keeping your workouts easy and frequent is more likely to keep you on track.
if you don’t have the time to recover like an athlete, don’t train like an athlete.
Second, when you start exercising what you find easy is very different from what you’ll define as easy 6 months down the road. Just like your hard workouts, your easy one’s will progress over time.
I’ll use my cardio as an example: summer 2018 it was 2.5 mph for 30 minutes, today it’s 6.2 mph for 30 minutes.
Third, let’s discuss what I mean by “hard” and “easy”.
Easy:
5-8 out of 10 for difficulty
15-60 minutes in length
the higher the difficulty, the lower the duration
Pretty broad definition, because what’s easy for one person isn’t easy for another.
Hard:
9-10 out of 10
or, >60 min
Now that we have our definitions, here are 5 reasons why most of your workouts should be easy:
Frequency
Pretty straight forward. If your workouts are shorter/easier, you can spend more days at the gym.
The benefits of working out frequently outweigh the benefits of working out hard, but infrequently.
You want to have the positive psychological benefits (wanted to eat better, having more energy, etc.) of exercise as frequent as possible.
30 min x 6 per week > 90 min X 3 per week
Repeatability
Similar to frequency, the easier and shorter your workouts are the more likely you are to enjoy them and do them again.
Building a positive relationship around exercise has greater long term benefits than trying to convince yourself that you’re still an athlete.
Productivity
Your hours in the day are limited. You want to make progress in your career, sleep well, socialize or talk to family, and fit exercise in there somewhere. Unless exercise is your new hobby, it should be as efficient of a process as possible.
Exercise is meant to compliment your lifestyle, not take away from it. There’s nothing wrong with spending 12 hours in the gym per week, but when you can spend 4-6 and get comparable benefits, that’s free time that can be spent improving your life in other ways.
Nutrition - The intensity/duration threshold
How many of you have worked out super hard only to crush 2 servings of pasta and a bowl of ice cream that night? I know I have. Then you wake up the next day feeling even worse.
For weight loss, exercise’s benefits are only a compliment to a good diet. Diet is the key. Working out too hard or too long can make you cross an intensity or duration threshold that can force you to overcompensate with food.
Stress Management
Let’s say it’s your busy season at work and unfortunately that also lines up with a few of your friends’ birthdays, so you’re out later on the weekends and barely getting 6 hours of sleep during the week.
The last thing you should do is overload your body with hard or long exercise, when it truly needs rest or light exercise. Layering stress on top of stress is the physiological version of “2 wrongs don’t make a right”.
Most of your exercise should leave you feeling more energetic, not less, as that’s a sign that you’re managing your stress and exercise appropriately.
Overall weekly structure:
If you’re just starting, aiming for 3x a week for at least 15 minutes a day is great. Focus on adding days of the week before making each day longer or harder.
Long term, shooting for 6 days a week of some form of exercise is optimal. That sounds like a lot, but again when 4-5 of them are short and/or easy that isn’t so bad.
My schedule:
three 30 minute EASY 5-6 out of 10 for intensity runs per week
5-6 out of 10 for difficulty
For many of you, this would be an incline walk to start, as it was for me 2 years ago
2 full body lifts that range from 20-60 minutes depending on how much time I have or waste.
These are my “hard” workouts
One day of just walking or staying on my feet
