I'm Dr. Shannon Ritchie.

I'm a doctor of physical therapy, fitness trainer, and founder of Ethelow Fitness.

In the Dr. Shannon show, you'll learn applicable tools to improve your health based on science.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, everyone.

I wanted to do an updated podcast about the minimum recommendations for strength and cardio.

So if you are ever in a season of life where you just are time constrained and you don't have the time to put in more of an ideal exercise routine, what is the minimum amount you can do with both strength training and cardio that will elicit gains? And then we'll also talk

about what's the minimum you can do to just kind of maintain. Again, if you're going through a season

of life, maybe you're sick or whatever it may be and you just need less, what it is the minimum amount that you can do

to both gain, fitness, and maintain. So first let's talk about what is ideal. And ideally,

you want a routine that incorporates three things. Aerobic exercise for mitochondrial, cardiovascular, and metabolic health, high-intensity

cardio like sprint training for the power benefits and the VO2 max benefits, and a hypertrophy

routine that increases lean mass and strength.

The ideal depends on the person, your training status, and what you can recover from.

So it's going to depend on your lifestyle, nutrition, your age, your training history.

All of those things will depend on your ideal.

But let's go over some kind of general ideals for each.

When it comes to aerobic exercise, we want at a minimum 150

minutes of light to moderate intensity cardio or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity cardio each

week. This can go all the way up to 300 minutes of light to moderate intensity cardio or more

if you love it and you have the time and it's something that you can easily fit into

your life. But that isn't necessary to see improvements in metabolic and cardiovascular health.

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