 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Coykey. Today we're gonna discuss, we're gonna ask this question, how much exercise is enough to stay healthy? So this kind of depends on where you're at. Are you in your current state considered healthy? If you're not, you need to look at this a little bit differently. You need to do things that are specifically uncomfortable so that you can push your body toward the state that you would like it to be in. Now, nothing about that is about maintaining. All of that is about progress. It's about getting closer to a goal. So you need to set a specific goal, maybe a specific body weight, maybe a specific body fat percentage. You need to measure those things at regular intervals and you need to come up with, you have that long-term vision. You need to come up with the short-term process goals that will help you take those tiny steps to get to that long-term goal because you can't just keep that long-term goal in mind for six months, because it doesn't mean anything, right? You'll know when you get there, but you don't know what to do to get there. So we have to come up with these process goals. Process goals are very important here. Now, this video is not about that. If you wanna talk a little bit more about that, the video I did yesterday on how much exercise is enough to lose weight is a better target for that. If, however, you are comfortable with where you're at and you really wanna know just how to stay there, then this video will talk a little bit more about that. So in the previous video, we talked about progressive overload. The thing that I would like to explain to you so that you can kind of understand how maintenance of fitness works is how your body responds to exercise. So progressive overload is actually a really good way to explain this. If I continue to do something that's a little bit harder, a little bit heavier, maybe I do more work in less time, maybe I rest less between sets, maybe I up the weight, right? Maybe I do an extra set, maybe I do an extra rep or two. Those types of things are progressing me. They are getting me stronger and fitter and I will see lasting impact from that. For maintenance, it's not really that important. So if your primary goal is not fitness related, maybe you just wanna feel healthy, maybe you just wanna have energy throughout the day, maybe you want to excel at your job, maybe you want to do well at your job but still have energy when you come home to play with your kids. Like all of those goals are totally reasonable and you don't need your life to center around fitness, okay? But you do need to continue working out. You do need to continue prioritizing your sleep. You do need to eat healthy, right? All of those things support this goal. But you don't need to go on any crazy diet. You don't need to feel super hungry from day to day. You don't need to, I think you should still probably prioritize your sleep pretty heavily. But you don't need to, you know, set a PR in your deadlift or your bench press or whatever. It's not about progressing at this point. It's about maintaining. And so what the body does is when it takes this stimulus of exercise, it says, okay, it's time to recover. Now that that shit's over, we need to figure out how to make this not that bad. And so if I push myself, then the body is gonna put on a little bit more. So that next time I push myself that hard, it doesn't hurt so bad. It doesn't feel so bad. But if I push myself to a level that is, you know, kind of familiar to me, then I can come back and my body will just say, okay, what we have right now is good. We can keep that, okay? So you're not gonna indefinitely build a bunch of muscle, but you're also not gonna lose it. Cause it's kind of expensive to keep muscle around, right? It takes more energy. It takes a lot of, you know, extra bandwidth. So your body, if you just lay in bed, it will get rid of all that. And it will keep some of your fat around and you will kind of lose the hard work that you've put in. Now it's easier to gain that back. So if you have some sort of injury setback, it's okay, you can come back from it. But to maintain your current level, you need to keep your current output. So I need to keep exercising. Maybe it just looks like the same stuff that I've done over and over and over again. Maybe it looks, you know, or, you know, maybe it's not the same, but maybe it looks very similar. I can just, you know, push myself to the same level. Maybe not to the brink of exhaustion, but maybe to, yeah, I'm sweating and yeah, it would be uncomfortable if I kept going. You know, somebody with chronic pain, if they push themselves to exhaustion, their physical fitness, their technique, their biomechanics is going to start to degrade. And so if I want to avoid that, because chronic pain management maybe is my primary goal, then I can keep my fitness or my exercise fatigue a little bit lower and I can still kind of, I can have something to recover from, but I don't have to push myself to where my joints are really hating me for it, okay? So that's a long, long convoluted process, but how much exercise is enough to maintain health levels? In general, you want to kind of get to a point where you're happy and then keep that fitness level. For heart health, the American College of Sports Medicine recommends five at least days of not vigorous, but hard exercise, hard cardiovascular exercise, exercise where you can still talk, but you're not too labored in your breathing and you are sweating for 30 to 60 minutes a day. That is just your aerobic recommendations. Now, some people can get away with less than that. My recommendation is that's kind of a lot and it's kind of hard to get that amount of exercise all the time, especially if you're not prioritizing it. I think most people would feel really good if they did that. So try it out. At some point in your life, you should try it out. But if not, as long as you're seeing your doctor regularly and you're measuring your health, you can do something for a long period of time. And if your doctor's not happy with it, then you need to change something. So if your cholesterol levels go way up, then you can look at, is my diet sloppy or should I throw on extra exercise? And you can also look at, what am I willing to do? What would I rather do? Sometimes changing your diet is probably the correct answer, but if it's hard to do, if you're around people who aren't very healthy all the time, then maybe the best you can do for right now is to just increase your exercise. There's a lot of ways to look at this. We talked about the five days of aerobic exercise. The other recommendation that the ACSM makes is you could do three days of more vigorous exercise. That would be something more like high-intensity interval training. That's generally a little bit more efficient in maintaining fitness, but definitely more stressful on the body. So consider that. I'm gonna make a video about that in a few days. Outside of that weight training, if you're trying to keep your muscle, you need to train about two times a week to maintain stuff. You could train once and push yourself really, really hard, but it's really difficult to do that. And again, with a joint thing, sometimes when you push yourself to that much fatigue, it can be pretty challenging on your chronic pain or your health levels. And that's kind of how I think about things. So two days of resistance training, three to five days of vigorous or hard exercise where you're sweating, cardiovascular stuff, that will keep you in some realm of healthy throughout the rest of your life.