By trying to win the game you are playing, you forget that you are running and jumping, forget that you are actually getting a healthy dose of exercise.
Dr. Trivedi and his colleagues began to wonder if adding a formal "dose" of exercise would increase their chances of getting better.
And moving out of that least-fit category requires, he says, "only a small dose of exercise," like 20 or 30 minutes of walking on most days of the week.
But she and other experts say there are still many unanswered questions about the long-term effects and efficacy of the wildly shrinking doses of exercise being studied and promoted by scientists and journalists, (including this writer).
(Dr. Baggish cycles, he runs — more than 30 marathons so far — and he competes in triathlons. "I certainly exceed any dose of exercise that has been said to be bad for you," he noted).
But in the exercising group, the dose of exercise required was nearly an hour a day of moderate-intensity activity, what the federal government currently recommends for weight loss but "a lot more than what many people would be able or willing to do," Ravussin says.
Less than 5% of U.S. adults accumulate the required dose of exercise to maintain health.
Consequently, the prescribed dose of exercise training varied widely, with some interventions offering a substantially greater volume of training than others.
Establishing optimal doses of exercise that augment a range of health benefits may inform physical activity prescription guidelines and possibly reduce the incidence of disease.
While trends could be identified, the optimal dose of exercise that is needed to produce hypoalgesia could not be systematically determined with the amount of data available.
