The article below is an excerpt from my newsletter: Well Enough with Harry Bullmore. To get my latest thoughts on fitness and wellbeing pop your email address into the box above to get the newsletter direct to your inbox.
This week, I’m here to tell you to aim to exercise less. Most of you, anyway.
This might seem like odd advice from a fitness writer, but bear with me – there’s method to the madness.
“Trying to throw the kitchen sink at exercise often doesn’t work or create the best results,” top coach Paddy James recently told me. “To get results, whether it is building muscle, getting stronger or getting fitter, the most important thing is finding [an exercise plan] we can be consistent with.”
Several weekly hour-long workouts might not fit this criteria. If you have work stress, a busy social life, or children to look after, an unmanageable exercise plan might prompt you to throw in the towel after a week or two.
Whereas a more palatable programme of two or three time-savvy sessions each week will allow for greater adherence and offer more fitness perks in the long run.
That’s the theme of this week’s newsletter: exercising to live, rather than living to exercise.
As I wrote in this recent article: “Most of us are not Olympians – for us, fitness is not about being optimal or puritanical in our approach.
“It is simply about doing what we can, when we can, while balancing this with an enjoyable life. The goal? To gradually build a capable and resilient body we enjoy living in.”
And for the vast majority of people, this is a far smaller commitment than you might think.
Paddy prescribes two 45-minute full-body strength training sessions each week. He advises prioritising compound or multi-muscle exercises such as squats, deadlifts, rows and presses for added efficiency, trying to work the major muscles (chest, back, shoulders, quadriceps, hamstrings and glutes) in each session, and aiming to accumulate six to ten working sets per muscle over the course of the week.
Each exercise should be performed with good technique, and each set should feel challenging, taken to a point where your movements are involuntarily slowing down as your muscles tire.
And there it is: what Paddy refers to as the “minimum effective dose” for building a more robust, competent body. There is a sample four-move workout demonstrating this approach in the feature linked here.
If you can underline this with a decent amount of daily movement – walking, swimming, cycling or whatever else you enjoy – you will have a pretty comprehensive fitness plan. If you can add in the occasional Pilates class or similar for a bit of varied movement (twisting, rotating, etc.) then you get an A+ from me.
On this topic, our second featured piece has a routine of varied movement from experienced physiotherapist Alex Morrell, who worked with several professional sports teams before setting up Move Physiotherapy.
The aim is to ease and prevent back pain through establishing mobility through the spine and teaching the body to move as one strong, cohesive unit.
My aim with this newsletter, and all of my articles, is to try and provide people with accessible, actionable and helpful information. Given low back pain affects more than 80 per cent of people in the UK at some point in their lives, according to the NHS, this felt like a good topic to cover.
Morrell’s tips for combatting back pain hit this brief. He suggests regulating our stress levels through breath work (breathing through the nose, five seconds in, five seconds out, for ten rounds), strengthening the surrounding muscles, and monitoring lifestyle factors that might contribute to our discomfort: poor sleep, stress, diet.
I enjoyed this insight in particular: “People overlook the importance of nutrition, hydration, sleep and other lifestyle factors that you take for granted – they underpin everything,” Morrell says.
“If you think about an athlete, coaches will try to optimise everything they do for better performance and recovery. Getting out of pain is a process of improving performance.”
And finally this week, I spoke to Professor Sarah Berry, associate professor at King’s College London and chief scientist at ZOE.
As a slight tangent, I recently looked to lose a bit of fat, but rather than overhauling my diet, I focused on changing the things I regularly do – having one slice of toast rather than two with my scrambled eggs, for example. This way, without doing any weighing of food or meticulous counting, I could be fairly sure I had slightly reduced my calorie intake.
Professor Berry’s advice is handy for achieving this. “On average we get 25 per cent of our energy from snacks, so opting for healthy snacks can be a great simple way to improve our health,” she says.
“Our research has shown that swapping typical UK snacks for almonds can reduce our risk of cardiovascular disease by a predicted 30 per cent,” she says.
“Almonds are an excellent source of fibre, unsaturated fats, vitamin E, magnesium and B vitamins, and they are incredibly beneficial for your long-term health and wellbeing.
“We found that people who reported a higher almond intake reported lower rates of anxiety, and were less likely to report neurodegenerative conditions like dementia or Parkinson’s.”
So, if you can swap your daily sweet treat for a handful of almonds, or simply subsidise part of it with a portion of nuts, the benefits are likely to stack up over time.
Now, on to our conclusion. The body is brilliantly adaptable, and if you make changes in your life, it will change accordingly. But the changes you need to make to see results are rarely as dramatic as most think.
For exercise, diet and beyond, find a health-promoting and (if possible) enjoyable routine you can stick to for the long haul. Then learn from it over time and make subtle fits to suit your goals and lifestyle.
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