Geschatte leestijd: 3 minutenIs doing cardio every day healthy or unhealthy? About 50 percent of the Dutch population exercises every week, but the group that exercises every day is much smaller. In our busy contemporary society, it’s almost impossible to find the time (or motivation) to exercise every day. But how important and healthy is it to do cardio every day or strength training every day? In this article, we’ll explain when it’s healthy to exercise every day and when it’s wise to take it easy.
Table of contents
- Elke dag cardio of elke dag krachttraining
- Elke dag krachttraining
- Elke dag cardio
- Elke dag bewegen
- Conclusie
Cardio every day or strength training every day
When you ask yourself the question: “Is exercising every day healthy?”, the answer is not black or white. There are sports that put less strain on your muscles and therefore can be performed more often. But there are also sports that are more intense and pose a heavier strain on your muscles. If you perform these sports too often, the risk of overuse is very present and overtraining is lurking. Additionally, the risk of injuries is also much greater if you train too often and too intensively.
To at least get a good guideline of when exercising more often is recommended, you can do the following:
Divide the physical activity into 3 parts:
Strength training
Cardio
Non-intensive movement
Below, we explain the guidelines for each part.
Read also our article: Stop asking “is this healthy”?
Strength training every day
As you can probably deduce, strength training is the most intense form of these 3 physical components. The idea with strength training is that you often force yourself to push the limit to stimulate the muscles. Not quite to muscle failure, as it’s called.
Because strength training is the most intense form of physical activity, the risk of overuse and injuries is also the greatest. Therefore, it’s recommended not to do strength training more than 3 or 4 times a week. After all, your muscles also need rest to recover from the training, which often takes 48 to 72 hours.
If you still want to do strength training every day or train more often, you can use a split routine, where you train a different muscle group every day. This way, you alternate the active muscle groups and give the muscles you’ve trained the rest they need to recover.
Cardio every day
If you want to do cardio every day, it’s a different story than if you want to do strength training every day. With cardio training, it depends on the sport you practice and also on the duration of your cardio training. With cardio every day, the strain on the muscles is less and therefore the recovery time is also shorter. However, it’s recommended not to do any form of cardio training longer than 1 hour per day.
Exercise every day
Actually, we’re already moving every day and hopefully we’re already exercising every day as well. It may not be cardio or strength training every day, but we walk, run, and cycle quite a bit daily. This form of daily movement is of course also something you can do every day. It’s even advisable to be active every day and take as many steps as possible. However, it’s not advisable to aim for 10,000 steps every day, as we described in the article “how many steps per day is healthy“, but there are many health benefits to moving every day.
Conclusion
If you want to do strength training every day, it’s recommended that you divide your workouts over the days so that you train a different muscle group every day. Your muscles need at least 48 hours of rest to recover from the strength training session. If you want to do cardio every day, it’s recommended not to do it longer than 1 hour per day. If you want to move every day, in the form of walking, cycling, or other daily activities, it’s advisable to do this as often as possible.
