Just two hours of exercise a week can have enormous benefits on your cardiovascular health

There is no doubt that exercise is there good for the heart. Regular exercise lowers blood pressure and cholesterol and reduces the risk of heart attack or stroke.

However, sometimes it can be hard to find the time (and motivation) to exercise. So what’s the least amount of exercise you can do while still maintaining these benefits? The answer depends on how fit you are to begin with.

Here’s the good news: the lower your starting point in terms of fitness, the less you need to do to see the benefits.

So, if you lead a completely sedentary lifestyle, just a miniature amount of exercise is enough to see a reduction in your cardiac risk. Starting with virtually no exercise, an hour or two a week of effortless cycling or brisk walking may be enough to reduce your risk of dying from cardiovascular disease by as much as 20%.

However, as fitness improves and exercise increases, the cardiovascular health benefits decrease and eventually plateau. This is sometimes called a J-shaped curve.

A sedentary person who stops doing nothing and starts exercising a few hours a week will see the greatest reduction in cardiovascular risk during this period. If they raise their exercise to four hours a week, there will be an additional – although smaller – reduction in risk (about 10%). But cardiovascular health benefits seems to peak at 4-6 hours per week – no additional benefit beyond that point for everyone.

However, one study in which sedentary people were trained to complete an endurance event such as a marathon found that when participants achieved 7-9 hours of training per week, they saw noticeable changes in heart structure.

Training at this level provides the same reduction in cardiovascular risk as training 4-6 hours per week. However, participants observed an raise in the amount of heart muscle, as well as dilation of the heart chambers. The heart is like any other muscle: if trained properly, it will get bigger. These changes have already taken place approx three months from the start.

So, while extra hours of exercise don’t raise your risk of cardiovascular disease much, these changes to your heart structure will mean you improve your fitness and hopefully run a faster marathon.

Previously, it was thought that these kinds of changes were only possible in competitive athletes – but this study is proof that if we are willing to commit, we can not only gain cardiovascular benefits, but also develop an athlete’s heart.

When you start doing an hour or two of exercise a week to improve your heart health, something amazing and unexpected may happen. Maybe you actually enjoy it. Four hours a week is the sweet spot that provides the greatest reduction in cardiovascular risk – but if you enjoy training or find a sport you love, you shouldn’t let that stop you from continuing your efforts.

Augment the intensity

The idea of ​​going from no exercise to exercising four hours a week can be daunting – especially if you don’t have a lot of free time. The intensity of training is vital here.

If you want to get the most bang for your buck when it comes to reducing your cardiovascular risk, you’ve got to sweat. High-intensity interval training (HIIT) is a time-efficient way to maximize your exercise gains. It is usually a 20-minute workout consisting of low, 30- to 60-second bursts of intense exercise, followed by a low rest in between.

Despite how low these workouts are, their intensity means that after a few weeks of HIIT training, you’ll likely notice many benefits – including a reduction in blood pressure and cholesterol. However, most HIIT studies have been too miniature to measure whether there is an effect on overall cardiovascular risk.

If you suffer from cardiovascular disease, you should exercise caution. There are several conditions – such as cardiomyopathy (a genetic disease of the heart muscle), ischemic heart disease (narrowing of the heart’s arteries) and myocarditis (inflammation of the heart, usually viral) – for which strenuous exercise is recommended against. People suffering from these conditions should limit themselves to low- or moderate-intensity exercise. This will still be good for your heart without putting you at risk of harm.

If finding time to exercise during the week is a challenge and you can only exercise on the weekends, rest assured that it will still be beneficial. One retrospective study of over 37,000 people found that people who did a full week’s physical activity for just 1-2 days had the same reduced risk of cardiovascular disease as people who exercised for a full week.

So for the self-proclaimed idle person who wants to improve their cardiovascular health, the message is uncomplicated: even a miniature amount of any type of exercise can make a gigantic difference.