I’ve talked before about the 10% per week rule. It states that you should not raise your activity level by more than 10% from one week to the next. The difficulty is that if you are just getting started, it will take you forever to get up to speed.
Say you are just getting going. In your first week, you do 10 minutes. It is better than none. The 10% rule would have you do 11 minutes week 2, 12.1 minutes week 3, 13.3 minutes week 4, etc.
Another rule that might make more sense is the 3-week rule. This one lets you take a bigger step up, but only once every 3 weeks.
Let’s say you start with something more ambitious, like 20 minutes per day or 140 minutes of exercise per week. In prior posts I recommend how to allocate this time between cardio and strength work. Here is the link for details.
By the 3-week rule, you would want to keep it at that level for 3 weeks. Assuming all went fine, you could go to 30 or 40 minutes a day for the next 3 weeks.
In terms of your target, think about 400 minutes per week as a goal for general health. You can also look at that by steps. A nice daily average would be 12500 steps. I just talked to one of our doctors. She is doing shelter in place in her home. She told me that every spare moment she is ‘pacing like a madwoman.’ She is averaging well over 10,000 steps per day without even going outside. It is possible!
To your best health,
Dr. C
