Dr. Lauren Colenso-Semple

I'm just going to do those outdoor physical activities with friends that I'm enjoying and also benefiting from.

I like to think of walking as something you can do that is not structured exercise.

And so we're not thinking about...

meeting a step count necessarily.

You can do that, but people who focus on something like step counts usually do so for a few months and then stop because being kind of obsessive about tracking that metric gets a little old.

And it's important to think not only about hitting one target, whether it's, you know, minutes of exercise per week or step count or heart rate goal, but what are we doing for the other hours in the day?

So I think somebody who isn't active at all going from doing exercise

very few steps to getting it up to four, five, 6,000 steps, yes, we're going to see a huge benefit.

But if you're somebody who is physically active in a variety of ways and you are moving throughout the day, not necessarily focusing

purely on steps, then that metric of step count is a little bit less useful because we are getting in that overall activity that is going to be beneficial for health.

Yeah.

And I think a lot of people are adding cardio for weight loss goals.

And that is a bit of a fool's errand because the fat loss that we will get from just adding exercise is pretty disappointing relative to the fat loss that we will see when we adjust our nutrition.

Yeah, the value of the really high intensity stuff is time efficiency.

So if we look at those adaptations to endurance exercise, or if we're going to just say cardio broadly, then you can get those by doing more long form, moderate intensity.

You can also get those by doing higher intensity for shorter amounts of time.

So it's not that...

It's magic in terms of the adaptation, but you're able to get more bang for your buck because you're doing that higher intensity and you don't need to do it for quite as long.

The short answer is no.

The conversation around the menstrual cycle is good.