Chapter 1: What is the 1:2 rule for exercise intensity?
Hello, friends. Today we're diving into a fascinating discussion about exercise intensity. Most of us have long accepted the simple guideline that one minute of vigorous exercise equals two minutes of moderate exercise. It's intuitive, neat, convenient, but what if it's fundamentally inaccurate?
That rule has shaped global physical activity guidelines for decades, yet it was largely based on calorie burn, not hard endpoints like mortality, cardiovascular events, diabetes, or cancer. Joining me to explore this important topic is endurance athlete Brady Homer, who has a master's in human performance and has collaborated with me before on the Found My Fitness comprehensive training guide.
Today we're breaking down a groundbreaking new study published in Nature Communications that used objective, device-based data to challenge decades of conventional exercise wisdom and guidelines. We break down the methods, the limitations, and what the data actually supports.
Chapter 2: How do calorie burn and longevity connect to exercise guidelines?
This is a journal club style episode. In this episode, Brady and I discuss how wearable accelerometers offer a more accurate picture of physical activity than traditional self-reported methods.
The surprising new finding that one minute of vigorous exercise could offer health benefits equivalent to four to nine minutes of moderate exercise, dramatically altering our understanding of exercise efficiency. Specific outcomes showing vigorous activity is up to eight times more potent for cardiovascular health and nearly 10 times as effective in diabetes prevention.
Why vigorous exercise uniquely triggers potent physiological adaptations like improved cardiovascular function? insulin sensitivity, mitochondrial health, and even reduced cancer risk through targeted cellular mechanisms. We talk about the practical implications for everyday life, including the powerful health habits of vigorous, intermittent lifestyle physical activity. These are VILPAs.
They're quick, sometimes unstructured, everyday lifestyle ways that we're getting our heart rate up. But we also talk about the structured exercise snacks. This new research really could rewrite the existing exercise guidelines entirely. It challenges fitness trackers, challenges exercise apps and public health messaging to completely recalibrate the way we value and measure physical activity.
Before we dive into today's episode, a quick reminder about our free evidence-based resource, How to Train According to the Experts. If you haven't downloaded this free guide yet, or even if you have, we just released major updates you'll definitely want to check out. You can find that at howtotrainguide.com. We've expanded our coverage on creatine supplementation with updated dosing protocols.
We also have fresh insights into how it impacts brain health and cognitive function.
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Chapter 3: Why is vigorous exercise considered more effective than moderate exercise?
We've also refined our recommendations on exactly how much exercise is needed to maximize longevity. and also how exercise snacks and even Vilpas can contribute meaningfully to our fitness goals. So this guide really condenses the best evidence-based strategies from our leading scientists that have been on this podcast into a real single actionable toolkit.
You'll find precise protocols in there for building muscle mass, building muscle strength, targeted training methods that are proven to enhance cardiorespiratory fitness. This is a really important marker for longevity.
We have updated science-driven strategies to support both metabolic health, cognitive performance, and then we also have some practical exercise routines that are really crafted for people with time-constrained schedules. Again, it's entirely free and it's available right now at howtotrainguide.com. Again, howtotrainguide.com.
And also, if you're intrigued a little bit more about the creatine and you want to explore it more deeply, we also have a comprehensive collection of resources on the Found My Fitness topic pages. So foundbyfitness.com forward slash topics. You can go to the creatine section, which is under the C, and you can find and read all about creatine there.
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So to join and support our work directly, please go to foundmyfitness.com forward slash premium. Again, that's foundmyfitness.com forward slash premium. Thank you so much for supporting evidence-based health and fitness education. Now let's jump into today's episode. Welcome back to the podcast.
Today, we're gonna be discussing this almost universally accepted rule that for every one minute of vigorous intensity exercise, that's equivalent to two minutes of moderate intensity exercise. And we're gonna talk about whether or not that's accurate and where it came from.
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Chapter 4: What implications do wearable devices have for measuring physical activity?
So, um, You know, hopefully we'll do more of these. So let's what do you think? Let's get started.
For sure. Yeah, I think this will be an interesting new structure kind of for the podcast, new for, you know, some of our episodes. And I'm excited to see how it goes. Excited to talk about this study. I think it was really a eye opening one in my mind. So, yeah, let's get into it.
Eye-opening, but not surprising, right? Totally. So, okay, well, I'm going to start off by just talking about what this, you know, one to two rule is for people because they might be like not exactly understanding what I'm talking about.
So essentially, you know, for decades now, we have these physical activity guidelines that's put out by the World Health Organization and, you know, other organizations that essentially state these physical activity guidelines, which essentially are...
For optimal health, which is sort of vague, but for optimal health, you want to be engaging in about 150 minutes to 300 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity per week. Or if you're going to be doing more vigorous type of physical activity, that would be more like 75 to 150 minutes. So that's essentially you have this one to two rule, right?
Where it's like, okay, for every one minute of vigorous intensity physical activity, you're going to be doing two minutes of the moderate intensity activity. And that's kind of where this rule came from. And I don't know that it's necessarily...
It's not necessarily telling you if you're trying to reduce different disease risks, so cardiovascular disease or cancer, fill in the blank, whatever disease. It's not really telling you that. It's just kind of like, this is the guidelines, right? So let's talk about the origin of this one-to-two rule. It really didn't come from direct measurements of health outcomes.
Essentially, it's researchers that calculated for... Vigorous intensity exercise, you're burning about twice as many calories as you do for moderate intensity exercise. So it really comes down to energy expenditure, not health outcomes.
Yeah, and that was kind of like the biggest, not surprise to me because I've known about this stuff for a long time, but when you really dig into it, it's like, what's the foundation of these recommendations? It is based on the idea of the thing called metabolic equivalent or metabolic equivalent of task. People maybe will have heard that referred to as METS or M-E-T-S.
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Chapter 5: What are the key mechanisms behind the benefits of vigorous exercise?
It's just so much better than we thought.
Yeah. And I think us discussing the mechanisms, you know, while... I think it's super important because the mechanisms explain why vigorous exercise is more beneficial for health outcomes than we thought with that two to one ratio. And that's why it has such as outsized benefit because it's it's sending this louder signal to the body, regardless of what you look at. You look at.
You look at blood glucose. You look at the cardiovascular adaptations. The overall signal is just louder. And it's not just a matter of, oh, you burn twice as many calories, so it's twice as good for your health. No, you can't really quantify it. It's an exponentially better increase for X outcome than
Chapter 6: How does the 2:1 exercise intensity ratio impact health outcomes?
that you're looking at this physiological mechanism, it's an exponential increase when you up that intensity. And so I think it's important for people to know what mechanisms are responsible. And then knowing that you can see, well, this is obviously why vigorous exercises is better or vigorous physical activity, rather to use the correct phrase, compared to lighter and moderate intensities.
Brady, I totally agree. And I think that, you know, obviously like for people that are focused on weight loss, like great two to one ratio, you know, that's perfect for you to consider as well as counting your calories or, you know, figuring out what you're consuming because that's obviously an important factor for weight loss. But like we're not talking about weight loss here.
We're talking about reducing our risk for, you know, cardiovascular disease and cancer and diabetes. And so it is really important to realize that two to one ratio is just out the door. It's out the door. And we didn't talk about all the mechanisms. I mean, we could spend like five hours just talking about mechanisms and people would be so angry with me. But like immune related responses.
I mean, there's so many other things going on. When you exercise, there's like 500 different molecules changing and, you know, different physiological processes happening. I mean, you just, that's why you can't pill up exercise. Yep. Like you just can't. It won't ever happen. Yes, I said that. It won't ever happen.
Someone's going to come out with an exercise pill and it's going to totally not be an exercise pill. And it's going to be one aspect of it. But like you just there's so many different physiological adaptations that are occurring in different organs. And you're just it's it's it's really a panacea. It really is.
Yeah. Everybody wants to say, oh, well, PGC-1-alpha, that's like the exercise pill. It's like, well, that's just one part of it.
Small part. Small part. One small part. I know. I mean, there's so many things to focus on. I mean, that's why... I really like in the past few years, exercise has been like the focus of not only this podcast, but just in my personal life. Like I have it's a priority, like no matter what I get exercise and it could just be 10 minutes. It could be 10 minutes of vigorous intensity exercise.
And now after this study, I'm even more excited about my 10 minute workouts because I'm really getting more than I even thought I was. Totally. So let's talk about some of these sort of short bursts of physical activity, starting with the Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Activity Studies. These are the VILPA studies. We've talked about these before on the podcast. Marty Kabala came on.
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Chapter 7: Why is it important for older adults to engage in vigorous activity?
He's been a co-author on some of these papers. Talking about this concept where, you know, researchers are using these accelerometers. They are measuring people's everyday movement in these short bursts that they don't necessarily consider if you sit down and ask them about their movements. physical activity for the past week, right?
So these short bursts of, you know, carrying groceries up three flights of stairs, or I raced to catch my, you know, subway because I didn't want to miss it. Or, yeah, I was playing with my new four-month-old puppy like I do twice a day or whatever. Like, these are short bursts of, your physical activity where you're getting your heart rate up in everyday situations.
It's not necessarily a structured exercise snack, which also is another way of doing that. But it's, again, it's the stuff that people are just sort of everyday doing as part of their lives. And there's just, I think, mounting evidence now there's beneficial outcomes with these types of short bursts of physical activity that we just can't ignore. We just can't ignore it anymore.
And I've probably cited this one nature study like a million times. So forgive me for the people that have heard me say this a million times.
I think you're responsible probably for the, I don't know, however many like downloads of that article on their website they have.
Yeah, it's pretty popular. It's People, these short vilpas can be anywhere between one minute to three minutes in length. You know, they're not super long. It's certainly not 10 minute on the Peloton, right? One to three minutes. And they're done multiple times a day, right? Because it's like just your everyday life is what we're talking about.
And so one of the most profound findings of the study I like to talk about, one of the vilpa studies, is on the upper end of that. So people that are doing like the three minutes thing. And they're doing that three times a day. So a total of almost 10 minutes a day, right? It's like nine minutes a day they're getting this physical activity.
And those individuals have a 50% reduction in cardiovascular-related mortality, 40% reduction in all-cause mortality, 40% reduction in cancer-related mortality. pretty robust.
I mean, especially if you start looking at some of these other studies where people are engaging in their structured physical activity based on their memories and their brain's ability to recall in the last week what they've done, it's even more robust than some of that. And the reason I like that, and I know that you feel the same, is that because it's actually capturing what's really going on.
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Chapter 8: How can children benefit from vigorous physical activity?
So they were doing 3.4 minutes of VILPAs per day, and that's a 45% lower risk of major cardiovascular events, a 67% lower risk of heart failure compared to the women that weren't doing any of these physical activity bursts throughout the day. And if you think about that, that's not a lot of time. And we all have aging parents.
Just imagine if we could get them to do four minutes a day of some kind of vigorous intensity activity. Now, maybe your parents are retired and they're not necessarily trying to get to the subway or the train or whatever. It's going to be more of a structured exercise snack and
I'll let you kind of talk about some of that, but they can engage in jumping jacks or maybe chair squats or people that are maybe not older, they can do burpees or body weight squats or pushups, like a combination of all these things. And we're talking about really having a pretty outsized effect on reducing some of these negative health outcomes. And the other thing is, is that
What was so interesting is there's another study that really was a VILPA study. When I say VILPA, again, people, I'm talking about vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. This isn't going to the gym and doing Peloton. This is just your movement throughout the day being as measured with an accelerometer. the benefits were equivalent to people that were doing structured exercise, right?
So there was like 62,000 people who actually did exercise and they compared that to people that were doing Vilpa. And it was crazy, but the same outcomes in terms of risk reduction, it was comparable. And I love that. I love it so much because it really... It really shows that your body doesn't care if it's structured exercise or not. It just wants the movement. It just wants the movement.
So super important to point out.
Yeah. And a lot of those studies, most of those studies, too, were in non-exercisers. So they were in people who reported or said that, you know, I don't regularly engage in structured exercise and then they just did VILPA. So the non-exercisers benefited that. And like you said, similar to people who exercise, which is kind of a crazy finding.
And it's interesting because reading all these studies and in the past few years is something that I definitely had changed my mind on in that I used to think, if you're not going to the gym for 30 to 40 minutes, and obviously it depends on the goal you're training for. If you're training for a competition or something, you need to do a dedicated training session.
But if it's kind of just for health outcomes, it used to be, oh, 15 minutes at least. And if you're not doing 30 to 45, it's kind of a waste of time. But now it just seems that even if it's less than 10 minutes, and they even removed it from the physical activity guidelines, the guidelines used to say 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous or 150 to 300 minutes of moderate.
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