What Is The Sweet Spot For Cardiovascular Exercise?

The emerging field of research known as the “excess endurance exercise hypothesis’ confirms that too much cardio is bad for your health, period. It promotes overuse injury, hormone imbalances, appetite dysregulation, fat storage, and - at the extreme - can increase cardiovascular disease risk. It’s also confirmed in the “sitting is the new smoking” research that too little cardio and too much sedentary behavior in life brings accelerated aging and increased disease risk. So - what’s the sweet spot of the optimal level of cardio to maximize your health benefits and enjoy an active, energetic lifestyle? It’s less than you may think. 

The prominent Copenhagen City Heart Study of 20,000 people that started in 1975 and continues today suggests that cardiovascular disease prevention benefits can be optimized with just 1-2.5 hours of comfortably paced jogging per week. Other research from Dr. Benjamin Levine, director of the Institute for Exercise and Environmental Medicine at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, reports that benefits of exercise to blood pressure, blood sugar regulation, and lowering overall disease risk continue to accrue up to five to eight hours per week. When you start drifting beyond eight hours per week, Levine asserts that, “you’re not training for health, you’re training for performance.” 

These research stats don’t mean that more exercise is unhealthy. As millions immersed into a fitness lifestyle can tell you, training for performance delivers a variety of incidental benefits like happiness, fulfillment, focus, discipline and camaraderie with fellow enthusiasts. If you follow a sensible and strategic training program, you can continue to accrue health and longevity benefits. However, it’s important to acknowledge that the returns are diminishing and you must approach serious training correctly to avoid the pitfalls. If you go to extremes in a narrow area of fitness such as endurance running, you have less time and energy to achieve bare minimum standard in important areas like strength training and sprinting, and also invite increased risk of burnout. Building aerobic fitness is not about struggling and suffering, so always cut back when you experience any symptom of overtraining. See our article about fat max heart rate to ensure that you exercise at a comfortable pace. 

Also, remember that strength training and sprinting deliver a far superior return on investment for overall fitness and longevity than cardio, and that you don’t need volume with high intensity exercise in order to obtain these benefits. As Mark Sisson has long communicated with the Primal Blueprint Fitness template, a couple strength training sessions per week lasting 10-30 minutes, and a single sprint session once every 7-10 days will deliver phenomenal fitness benefits. Make sure you prioritize these sessions over steady-state cardio if you are pressed for time. Besides, both strength training and sprinting deliver an outstanding cardiovascular training effect anyway.