Is 20 Minutes Per Day Enough for Fitness?

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23 Mar

Last Updated on June 18, 2016 by Michael Brockbank

A lot of ads and professionals attest that you only need 20 minutes per day or more to experience optimum fitness. However, this isn’t entirely accurate. In reality, it depends more on your individual physique and how much food you consume on average each day. For many of us, 20 minutes of exercise is not going to cut it when it comes to fitness.

How Much Exercise Should You Get in a Day for Optimal Fitness?

There are several factors that go into how much activity you should get in any given day. Don’t assume that 20 minutes is going to make you thin in a short period of time. For the best fitness practices, it’s going to take an alteration of your lifestyle if you want to really shed those pounds.

Eating
The biggest contributor that you have to realize before planning your exercises is the amount of food you eat during any given day. A 20 minute workout may be great for those who consume less than 2000 calories. Based on what I eat throughout the day, my workouts tend to be between 30 and 45 minutes. A large part of that is because of the snacks I like to have. The more you eat, the greater the workout you’ll need to burn those calories and carbs.

Personal Physique
Everyone is different when it comes to tolerance levels, heart rates and other physical measures. For example, it takes less effort for an obese person such as myself to get the heart rate up during activities. This is partly why fat people can burn calories and carbs faster than a skinny person. Although the 20 minute workouts can sound tempting, these ads don’t go into detail about the data used to come to that conclusion.

Types of Exercise or Activity
Different exercises are going to affect people in different ways. What works best for one person may not do anything for someone else. While it’s true that certain activities can be somewhat universal for workouts, your body structure will modify the end result of any exercise. To say that any workout can burn a set number of calories over a specific amount of time is, for the most part, false. This is why I tell my readers what exercises do for me on a personal level. It is up to you to decide whether or not the exercise is worth your time.

What’s My Optimal Exercise Routine?

My exercise routines vary from day to day. Sometimes I won’t feel like pushing myself with core work, and other days I concentrate on nothing but my abs. On average, I try to spend anywhere from 20 to 45 minutes doing various activities. I also take into consideration on what I eat throughout each day as well.

For example, I was bad today and ate a Spicy McChicken and a McDouble from McDonalds. This means I want to spend close to an hour doing various exercises throughout the day because this was 770 calories for lunch – which boils down to nearly three cans of Progresso soup. Usually, I’ll break it up in two separate physical activities. As soon as I am done writing this post, I am going to do some dumbbell workouts.

Using MyFitnessPal
MyFitnessPal is one of the most influential factors when planning my daily activities. Right now, I only have 400 plus calories left for the day and it’s just after lunch time. If I want to have dinner tonight, I need to make sure my calories remain in the green. My activities will center around what can keep the numbers in MyFitnessPal in the positive. If I want to shed 300+ calories, I’ll play 25 to 30 minutes of Xbox Kinect Tennis.

Starting at a 20 minute workout can be good for your health to start with. Don’t think that this amount of time alone is going to deliver amazing results. There are just too many variables that can change what is optimum for you. Spending 20 minutes on the best exercise machine ever created isn’t going to matter much if you eat excessively. It all comes down to changing several habits in your life to promote healthier living.

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