Do You Need to Exercise Every Day?

We can all picture the maniacal fit-spo images that people love to share:

Eat Clean, Train Mean.

Be Stronger Than Your Excuses.

Sweat Is Your Fat Crying.

And the classic, No Days Off.

No Days Off, meaning this person exercises each and every day in pursuit of their fitness dreams. No rest days, no lazy days. They’ll cancel your lunch plan if it interferes with gym time and frequently ask if you want to take a thirty-mile jog with them. This person is going to WORK OUT like no one has WORKED OUT and they are ALWAYS going to post about it on social media.

This person is annoying. If this is No Days Off, I don’t want it.

Except…

This person is the fittest person you know. They might be annoying, but they’re healthy as shit. They’re jacked, they run marathons, they’ve got dazzling cholesterol counts. They’ve never even heard of diabetes and age will mean nothing to them. They’ll be taking boxing lessons at 90 while we all complain about our trick knees at 60. They can cook broccoli rabe AND pronounce quinoa.

So what’s the deal? Do you need to work out every day in order to gain the best health benefits from exercise? Should I ask my doctor if posting my WODs every day is right for me?

Yes.

Even though the current CDC guidelines recommend doing 30 minutes a day, five days a week, you should be moving every single day.

Why? Because of sitting.

Americans sit on average for eight hours a day. Only 3% of people sit for fewer than four hours a day. And 44% of people never exercise in the times when they aren’t sitting. That sucks. Believe me when I say that our bodies are desperate to move every day, above and beyond the recommendations.

But like an onion, there are layers to this, because overtraining is a real thing and you don’t want that either. Overtraining is when you do the same exercises the same way for a really long time without taking enough rest. Unsurprisingly, this can lead to tendon, muscle, and bone injuries. But it can also lead to serious mood disorders, endocrine dysfunction, and central fatigue of the nervous system (translation: bad). Recovery can take years.

So why do I recommend daily activity? Because lots of studies have shown that people who work out 5–7 days a week are killing it. That level of activity is associated with a 50–80% lower risk of mobility impairments, increased longevity by around four years, and increased disability-free life expectancy by around two years.

I can’t overemphasize this enough: Your quality of life is better when you exercise daily.

So we want to work out every day but we don’t want to die of overtraining. How do we do it?

Glad you asked. There are three things you need to consider when it comes to moving every day:

The Level of Impact

All movement is fair game on any given day, but there must be a distinction between high-impact things and low-impact things. A person who sprints every day is going to have an amazing level of fitness for a year, and then have Achilles tendonitis and exhaustion for the next three years.

If you enjoy running (there’s gotta be someone out there who does), of course you can run every day. You just need to adjust for impact. For example, a gentle jog is not the same as an all-out sprint. Walking interspersed with jogging is not the same as a steady jog. Running up a hill is not the same as running down a hill. Change your impact.

How do you program impact? Whatever activity you enjoy, create a list of every iteration of that activity. Determine which ones are high-impact and which ones are low. Then program a maximum of three days of higher-impact (not in a row) per week.

The Level of Intensity

Intensity can be related to impact level but is not the same. A very low-impact activity can be very high intensity. Swimming a 100 meter freestyle in four minutes? Easy breezy. In 45 seconds? World record. Yet both efforts are low-impact.

Important side note: The No Days Off crew is big into No Low-Intensity Workouts and this is nonsense. There’s a massive public perception that a workout only counts if you finish it in tears. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only are low-intensity workouts still great for you, they’re vital for recovery.

Getting fitter/stronger/bigger doesn’t happen during exercise. You get fitter/stronger/bigger during the recovery. Only exercise noobs think that a low-intensity workout isn’t worth anything. These people would try to prove how well-read they are by only reading Thomas Pynchon. They might as well just chuck themselves into the ocean, surrounded by thousands of pages of relentless exposition and misery. A well-read person can talk about and enjoy light books as well as she can talk about and enjoy deep ones. Same with exercise.

How do you program intensity level? First, when it comes to intensity, recognize that no matter what your program says to do that day, you need to check in with your body first. Do you feel like absolute dog shit? Is your mood unstable? Are you in distress after a bad decision or a fight with a friend? The days when your body is screaming an SOS are not the best days for high-intensity work. Do your workout, but consider something gentler. Negative emotions are already coursing through your cells. You don’t need to add literal physical destruction to that. (The one exception is anger. Rage workouts are the fucking best.)

If you’re not mentally unstable on a table, then you can use these general guidelines:

2 to 3 days of high-intensity work.

1 to 2 days of moderate-intensity work.

2 to 3 days of low-intensity work.

If you’re new, replace one of the high-intensity days with a moderate-intensity day. As you improve your tolerance, you can add it back in.

The Amount of Time

The last part — how long you spend exercising each day — is like a canopy over the other parameters. There are days when I do three hours at Ninja Warrior practice and there are days when I do yoga for fifteen minutes. Timing is the easiest to adjust because exercise timing is super flexible. Short workouts are phenomenal. Long workouts are sensational.

How do you choose the length of your workouts? When it comes to the low end of time frame, it’s a bit like the math competition in Mean Girls: the limit does not exist. Getting in five minutes is better than getting in zero minutes. On the other end, someone who’s training for an Ironman race might find themselves doing seven or eight hours a day. I don’t recommend that, but nearly anything in between is gonna work. You could do a twenty-minute walk or a two-hour walk and both are great.

What all three parameters have in common is the amount of load you’re putting on your body. Impact, speed, time; these are all loads. The greater the load, the greater the demand for recovery. If you choose to work sprints for ninety minutes, it puts an enormous load on your body. If you choose to sit in and out of a chair for one minute, it puts almost no load on your body.

On the flip side, doing just one sprint is a small load, while sitting in and out of a chair for three straight hours is a ton of load. The parameters of each load are always relative to each other.

So manipulate each of the three dials until you find a variety of workouts that challenge you to move every day but also get suitable rest and recovery.

Here’s a scale to help you do that:

Low impact + Low intensity + Short time = difficulty of 1 on a scale of 1–10.

High impact + High intensity + Long time = difficulty of 10 on a scale of 1–10.

Neither of these should make up the majority of your workouts. Your workouts cannot be all 10s or all 1s. Period. Any other combination will work for the majority of your daily exercise.

Now listen, I’m not a monster. We all need those days where we sit on the couch for 12 hours binging queso and Cheer season two. But as a general rule, moving every day is going to be better for your life than wondering whether TVCC or Navarro is gonna take Daytona this year.

For daily workouts, remember:

Make some part more difficult (higher intensity, impact, or go for a longer time).

Make some part easier (lower intensity, impact, or go for a shorter time).

Every once in a while, make all the parts difficult.

Every once in a while, make all the parts easy.

Don’t forget to post your shit every day on social media. And I’ll give you one more leg up: it’s pronounced “keen-wa.”