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Exercise is enormously good for you and offers many health benefits. After all, if you exercise regularly, you become fitter, more energetic, leaner, and stronger. But is it also healthy to exercise every day? As with many things, anything with “too” in front of it is not good for you. Like: tequila. 😉
The risk of exercising every day is that you can overtrain yourself, which can be detrimental to your health. But when is exercising too much and how do you recognize that you are exercising too much? I’ll take you through this article and try to give you some more explanation so that you can better understand and recognize it.
The benefits of exercising for your health
Many people love sports. There are even people who claim they are addicted to it. And that’s not strange. Sports just have many benefits, both for your body and mind.
I’ll list some benefits:
- By exercising, you burn calories and can lose weight and get leaner, so your body gets in better shape. Your muscles and lines become more visible and you see more definition.
- By exercising, you also build more muscle mass. This is especially the case when you do strength training. These muscles not only give your body a natural athletic look and radiance but they also help in daily life when you have to carry heavy groceries. And did you know that muscle mass helps with weight loss?
- Better conditioning through cardio training. If you do a lot of running, cycling, or swimming, you can greatly improve your condition with that. This naturally has all sorts of other benefits for your heart and blood vessels.
- Hormones are also very happy with your physical activity. Humans are not naturally made to sit still all day, so when you maintain an active lifestyle, you produce more hormones that can lead to a happier life.
- By exercising a lot, your brain also stays sharp and active, and you can concentrate better. In addition, you reduce the chance of various diseases such as Alzheimer’s when you exercise actively.
Of course, there are many more benefits to mention, but I’ll leave it at these 5 for now.
Exercising every day
There are people who are so addicted to exercising that they do it every day. Often the underlying idea is also: exercising is healthy, so the more often I do it, the better (and healthier) it is. But is that so?
Let me start by saying: exercising every day is always better than not exercising every day. But unfortunately, there can also be risks associated with doing too much physical activity.
Whether you are doing too much exercise also depends a lot on the type of sport you do.
For example, you can take 10,000 steps every day which you can easily sustain.
If you do a full body workout with heavy weights every day, overtraining and injuries are lurking.
Doing strength training every day?
Let’s start with strength training. Is it smart / advisable / healthy to do strength training every day?
The answer to this is: no
Your body often needs some time to recover after an intensive strength training workout. After all, the muscles you train cause small micro traumas and they need to heal, making you stronger each time. This recovery time is often around 48 to 72 hours.
So when you train the same muscles again within that time, you actually do more damage.
Naturally, this is not desirable. In addition to this damage, your muscles and tendons can also be injured by too much strength training. So be careful.
How often should you do strength training?
According to a recent study in Sports Medicine, you can train each muscle group twice a week for the best results.
In a study, scientists analyzed 10 previous studies on muscle growth and frequency, and they found that your muscles grow maximally when you train them twice a week.
An important detail from this analysis is that the researchers also specifically looked at the number of repetitions and sets. So the result of the workouts is better when doing 3 sets on 2 days than 6 sets on 1 day.
According to Brad Schoenfeld, researcher and sports scientist, this is because strength training triggers muscle growth for about 48 hours. So your muscles grow up to those 48 hours and then stop growing. Until you train them again, then you provide a training stimulus for another 48 hours.
So you might think that with 3 times a week you can achieve even better results. Right?
Unfortunately, this is not the case. The same analysis by
the scientists showed that people who train 3 times a week achieve the same results as those who train 2 times a week.
Brad Schoenfeld therefore also advises:
When you divide your workouts into upper body and lower body (the upper body and lower body split), you can do 2 upper body workouts per week and 2 lower body workouts.
Everyday cardio
Cardio training such as cycling, swimming, and running is less stressful for the body than strength training. This often means that your body doesn’t need as much recovery from these workouts.
If you do cardio every day, like walking, you don’t need to recover for 48 to 72 hours, so theoretically you could do this more often.
Unfortunately, you do need to consider the type of training you do. After all, if you run 10km every day, that’s a different intensity and load than the 10,000 steps you take every day.
In addition, your cortisol hormones can also peak significantly after a cardio workout. This means that you produce more of this stress hormone, which can lead to a higher burning of your muscle mass.
How much cardio is healthy then?
It is therefore a valid question to ask how much cardio is healthy. After all, you don’t want the negative effects of cortisol peaks.
The advice is therefore not to do cardio training for more than 1 hour a day in a row. Do you want to go running for 30 minutes every day? Then that’s fine. But if you’re going to run 10km or more every day, the advice is really to build in more rest as well.
Also read the article: is every day cardio healthy?
Conclusion
In conclusion: it is certainly recommended to exercise more often if you haven’t already. Where the limit lies or if you exercise too much depends a lot on the sport you practice. Overtraining and injuries can be lurking.
In addition to a good and personal training plan, variation is another method to prevent injuries and complications. After all, you could easily do strength training 3 days a week and combine this with 2 days of running per week.
That way, you can train and exercise almost every day of the week without injuring or overtraining yourself.
