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What’s the Minimum Effective Dose of Exercise?
How much exercise do you really need?
Spend enough time on social media and you could be forgiven for thinking good health requires five gym sessions a week, 10,000 steps every day, Zone 2 cardio, HIIT, mobility work, Pilates and possibly an ice bath before breakfast.
Thankfully, the human body isn’t quite that demanding.
One of the most useful concepts in exercise science, particularly for Personal Trainers working with busy clients, is the minimum effective dose of exercise.
In simple terms:
What is the smallest amount of exercise somebody can do and still get a meaningful benefit?
And the answer might be considerably less than you think.
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What Does Minimum Effective Dose Actually Mean?
The minimum effective dose, or MED, is essentially the smallest training stimulus required to produce a worthwhile adaptation.
But there is an important question we need to ask first:
Minimum effective dose for what?
Because the amount of exercise required to improve somebody’s general health is very different from the amount required to maximise muscle growth, run a marathon or compete in a strength sport.
Someone might exercise for:
- General health and longevity
- Cardiovascular fitness
- Strength
- Muscle growth
- Fat loss
- Sports performance
- Mental wellbeing
- Simply feeling fitter and more capable
This is why good programme design starts with the individual rather than the programme.
Personal Trainers are taught to consider principles such as specificity, progressive overload, individual differences, recovery and FITT, alongside a client’s goals, preferences, motivation and barriers to participation.
The minimum effective dose should therefore be thought of as a starting point, not a universal prescription.
What’s the Minimum Amount of Exercise Needed for Health?
This is where things get interesting.
According to the latest UK Chief Medical Officers’ physical activity guidance, there isn’t an absolute minimum threshold below which exercise suddenly stops being beneficial.
Some activity is better than none.
In fact, the biggest improvement in health per additional minute of physical activity appears to occur in people who currently do the least exercise. Even bouts lasting less than ten minutes can contribute towards better health.
That is an incredibly useful message.
If your client currently does virtually no exercise, getting them walking for ten minutes each day is not pointless because they haven’t completed a 45-minute workout.
Quite the opposite.
Going from nothing to something may be one of the most important changes they can make.
What Are the UK Exercise Guidelines?
While there is no magic threshold for receiving any benefit, there are evidence-based targets associated with substantial health benefits.
For adults, the UK guidelines recommend working towards:
150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity per week
or
75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity per week
or an equivalent combination of the two.
Adults should also perform activities that strengthen the major muscle groups on at least two days each week.
Moderate activity might include brisk walking or cycling. A simple way to monitor it is the talk test, you should generally be able to talk but not comfortably sing.
With vigorous exercise, such as running, you’ll usually find talking in full sentences much harder.
These recommendations are excellent targets.
But they shouldn’t accidentally become a barrier.
If somebody currently manages zero minutes of exercise per week, telling them they must immediately find two and a half hours might make exercise feel like yet another thing they’re failing at.
Starting with 30, 50 or 60 minutes a week and gradually building upwards could be a far better coaching strategy.
A Little Exercise Can Produce a Surprisingly Big Return
Exercise doesn’t appear to follow a simple relationship where twice the exercise automatically gives twice the benefit.
Instead, there appears to be something of a diminishing return.
One huge 2023 dose-response meta-analysis combined evidence from 94 cohorts involving more than 30 million participants.
The biggest difference in health risk occurred between people doing essentially no activity and those working towards the recommended amount.
At around the equivalent of 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per week, researchers observed an association with approximately 31% lower all-cause mortality risk compared with inactivity.
More exercise was associated with further benefits, but the additional gains became progressively smaller.
That doesn’t mean 150 minutes is some magical ceiling.
It means that if we’re trying to get an inactive person healthier, getting them moving at all should be celebrated.
What About Strength Training?
The same principle applies in the gym.
You do not need a six-day bodybuilding split to become stronger.
A large 2023 systematic review and network meta-analysis examined 178 resistance-training studies for strength and 119 for hypertrophy.
The researchers found that every resistance-training prescription they examined produced greater strength and muscle growth than doing no resistance training.
Heavier loads tended to produce the greatest improvements in maximal strength, while programmes containing multiple sets tended to rank more highly for hypertrophy.
But here’s the useful bit for everyday clients:
You can achieve meaningful results without doing the amount of training required to maximise results.
There is a massive difference between asking:
“What’s optimal?”
and asking:
“What’s enough to make this person stronger?”
For example, research into resistance-trained men has found that even a single challenging set of approximately 6 to 12 repetitions performed two or three times per week can produce meaningful, although not maximal, strength improvements in exercises such as the squat and bench press.
That isn’t necessarily how I’d programme for somebody trying to maximise their physique or strength.
But it’s useful to know when you’re coaching somebody who says:
“I’ve only got half an hour twice a week.”
Great.
We can absolutely work with that.
Do You Have to Exercise Every Day?
Not necessarily.
Being active regularly throughout the week has plenty of practical benefits, but accumulating your exercise in fewer sessions can still be useful.
A study involving almost 90,000 people wearing accelerometers found that people who accumulated most of their moderate-to-vigorous activity over just one or two days per week had similarly lower risks of several cardiovascular conditions compared with people who distributed their exercise more evenly throughout the week.
So if somebody works long shifts Monday to Friday but loves exercising at the weekend, don’t immediately tell them they’re doing it wrong.
Their lifestyle matters.
Of course, frequency also affects things such as recovery, training quality, skill development and programme design.
But from a general health perspective, the body doesn’t appear to throw your Saturday hike in the bin because you didn’t exercise on Wednesday.
Don’t Forget About Sitting
There is another part of this conversation that gets overlooked.
Someone could technically complete their three weekly workouts and still spend most of their waking life sitting down.
Current UK guidance recommends reducing sedentary time where possible and breaking up prolonged periods of inactivity with light activity.
Importantly, prolonged sitting appears to be associated with poorer health outcomes even among people who achieve recommended levels of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.
So exercise isn’t just about workouts.
Walking the dog counts.
Walking to work counts.
Taking the stairs counts.
Gardening counts.
Cycling somewhere rather than driving counts.
A five-minute walk between meetings counts.
Movement matters.
What About Exercise for Weight Loss?
This needs separating from the health discussion.
You can become healthier through exercise without necessarily losing much weight.
The UK Chief Medical Officers’ guidance makes an important distinction here, diet is a major factor in weight management, while physical activity provides important health benefits irrespective of whether body weight changes.
So somebody shouldn’t judge whether their exercise programme is “working” entirely by what happens on the scales.
They might simultaneously be improving their:
Cardiovascular fitness, blood pressure, strength, mobility, blood glucose regulation, mood, physical function and long-term health.
None of those require the bathroom scales to applaud.
So What Could a Minimum Effective Exercise Programme Look Like?
For a busy, previously inactive adult, I might initially think much more simply than people expect.
A realistic starting point could be:
Two short full-body strength sessions each week, focusing on major movement patterns such as squatting, pushing, pulling and hinging.
Alongside that, introduce regular brisk walking, perhaps starting with 10 to 20 minutes at a time and gradually accumulating more across the week.
Encourage more everyday movement through walking, active travel, stairs and regularly breaking up periods of prolonged sitting.
Then progress the programme over time.
That programme won’t turn someone into an Olympic athlete.
That’s rather the point.
We’re trying to establish the smallest sustainable dose that starts moving somebody towards their goals.
Once that becomes easy and habitual, we can increase it.
The Minimum Effective Dose Is Not the Optimal Dose
This distinction is important.
Minimum effective does not mean optimal.
If you want to maximise muscle growth, sports performance, cardiovascular fitness or strength, you’ll probably need considerably more training than the minimum.
Our Level 4 Strength and Conditioning qualification goes much deeper into concepts such as specificity, progressive overload, recovery, periodisation, strength, hypertrophy, power, speed and individualisation.
But not everybody needs an optimised athletic development programme.
Most Personal Training clients need something that produces results and fits their actual life.
And sometimes a slightly less “optimal” programme that somebody follows consistently will outperform the perfect programme they abandon after three weeks.
This Is Where Personal Trainers Can Make a Huge Difference
One of the biggest mistakes new trainers can make is assuming that because they love exercise, their clients should love doing loads of it too.
Your client might have children.
They might work 50 hours a week.
They might be caring for somebody.
They might hate gyms.
They might have failed at exercise ten times before meeting you.
Our own Storm student research repeatedly identifies time pressure, overwhelm, confidence and fitting things around work and family as genuine barriers people experience.
Giving that person a five-day programme because it’s theoretically optimal could be terrible coaching.
Ask instead:
What is the least we need to do to start making progress?
Get them succeeding.
Build confidence.
Create consistency.
Then gradually increase the dose.
That’s progressive overload applied not just to muscles, but to behaviour.
The Bottom Line
So, what’s the minimum effective dose of exercise?
There isn’t one single number.
For general health, the evidence increasingly supports a wonderfully simple message:
Some is good. More is better.
There is no minimum amount required before exercise suddenly becomes worthwhile, and even very short bouts of activity can contribute towards better health.
From there, adults should aim towards around 150 minutes of moderate activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity each week, plus strengthening exercise on at least two days.
And if somebody isn’t there yet?
Start where they are.
Because the person who goes from doing nothing to walking regularly and lifting weights twice a week may experience a much bigger improvement in their health than the fitness enthusiast worrying about whether their sixth workout should contain three sets or four.
The best programme isn’t necessarily the programme that looks most impressive on paper.
It’s the one that creates enough stimulus to work, while being realistic enough to keep doing.
And helping somebody find that balance is one of the most valuable skills a Personal Trainer can develop.
Want to Learn More About Exercise Programming?
If you love learning about training and would like to turn that knowledge into a career, our Level 3 Personal Trainer qualification teaches you how to assess clients, design individualised exercise programmes and coach people safely and effectively. The qualification specifically develops programme design, exercise delivery and the ability to adapt training to individual clients and their goals.
But becoming qualified is only the beginning.
There are thousands of Personal Trainers out there, so if you really want to stand out, develop deeper knowledge and become a more capable coach, take a look at our Elite Package.
It’s designed for people who don’t simply want to become a Personal Trainer, they want to build the knowledge, confidence and expertise to differentiate themselves within the fitness industry.
Already qualified and particularly interested in advanced training and athletic performance? Our Level 4 Strength and Conditioning qualification is another great progression route, taking you deeper into areas such as strength, power, speed, periodisation and advanced programme design.
Ready to turn your passion for fitness into something more? Explore our courses and find the pathway that’s right for you.
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