A body in motion stays in motion — as long as you’re smart about balancing your workload.
When it comes to movement, more is generally better.
Each week, adults should do 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity, 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity, or some combination of the two each week, plus muscle-strengthening activities on two or more days a week, according to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, which were updated in 2018.
But get this: People who worked out two to four times that amount — about 300 to 599 minutes each week — saw even more health benefits, including a longer life span, according to a 2022 study of more than 116,000 people.
The human body is meant to move. “I kind of liken it to a pond,” says Nikita Fear, a Tier IV Coach at Equinox Highland Park. “Think of the slush at the bottom of a pond. When it’s stagnant and still, over time, it starts to get harder and harder. But when there’s movement, it kind of wakes everything up at the bottom and makes it easier for everything to move the way it’s supposed to.”
But working out daily doesn’t mean you have to stick to 45- or 60-minute sessions every single day. Instead, it’s about using those guidelines to determine a schedule that works best for your body.
Before you can think about daily training, you have to look at the larger picture. “What are you training for and why?” asks Fear. From that zoomed-out perspective, you can break exercise down into macrocycles (which can last a year or more), mesocycles (intermediate phases that typically last several weeks to a few months), and microcycles (which last one to four weeks). FYI: This approach is called periodized training and can be applied to any fitness goal.
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Then, when you're breaking down a single week or so of training, it should follow an undulating rhythm, says Fear. “Let’s say you start with a low-intensity day on Sunday, then Monday could be a medium effort, Tuesday a high-intensity day, and then we go back to medium, low, medium, high, and so on — there’s this nice rise and fall throughout the week,” she notes.
The key is that you’re balancing high-intensity efforts, whether that’s strength training or aerobic exercise, with active recovery days. For example, “If you’re working on squats on a high-intensity Tuesday, you’ve then got Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday to recover before hitting that muscle group with another high-intensity effort,” Fear explains.
Most guidelines recommend that the average person leave at least 48 hours between training the same muscle group. But a 2018 study published in Frontiers in Physiology found that those who waited just 24 hours before repeating a workout — consisting of leg presses, lat pull-downs, leg curls, shoulder presses, and leg extensions — saw similar muscle growth to those who waited 48 to 72 hours. “It’s really about perception,” says Fear. “How do you feel? Is your body ready to take on that effort again?”
That said, you should keep your hard days hard and your easy days easy. If you’re doing a hard cardio workout, like high-intensity interval training on the bike or treadmill, you should also do a harder lower-body resistance training workout that same day rather than doing it the following day — that allows your body to truly recover. “We’re all working out to have some kind of adaptation,” says Fear. “It’s only when you recover that those adaptations can take place.” If you’re doing high-intensity efforts every day, even if they’re targeting different body parts, your body won’t be able to keep up with recovery.
That’s where active recovery comes in. The key to active recovery workouts is to keep the intensity to 30 to 60 percent of your maximum heart rate, according to a 2019 review in the Journal of Strength and Conditioning Research. That intensity won’t put excess demands on your body. Active recovery can include any kind of lower-intensity effort, whether that’s yoga, Pilates, walking, swimming, easy cycling, jogging, or even light resistance training.
It also includes acts of daily living, says Fear. “Sometimes we forget that the things we do throughout the day — playing with kids, doing chores or yard work — still require effort,” she says. You can also use “exercise snacks,” or 10-minute-or-less bursts of activity, on lower-intensity days to increase your overall weekly volume. “Instead of thinking of it as ‘working out,’ think of it as ‘working in’ more activity to your day,” says Fear. “Even if you have just five minutes after a call, you can get up and do 10 squats or incline push-ups or a mobility series to get your heart rate up just a little bit.”
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Of course, no one’s meant to go-go-go 100 percent of the time. While you absolutely can work out every day, there might be weeks where you need to pull back and incorporate a full rest day (or a few!) — and not just because of soreness. Exercise is stress, and when your body can’t keep up with a certain amount of stress, you may experience signs of overtraining, like poor sleep, fatigue, a lack of motivation, elevated heart rate, and workouts feeling harder than they should, says Fear.
“If you’re feeling any of those symptoms over the course of a week or more, that's a sign to start asking yourself whether you’re overextending yourself a bit,” she says. “And it’s always better to stop and take a break before you get injured and are forced to stop.”
The more experienced you are, the more in tune you’ll be with your body and the easier it becomes to figure out what you need to maximize your performance. So don’t be afraid of the rest day! “As a culture, we always want to do more,” says Fear. “But there’s something wonderful about being able to work out from a place of rest and recovery. That gives us an opportunity to be more clear on what we want to accomplish.”