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If you can't talk, it's strenuous
The talk test
The recommendations are 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise or 75 minutes a week of high-intensity exercise. Pickleball with a teammate, chatting as you play, counts as moderate. No watch or heart rate reading is needed, because being unable to talk is the signal of strenuous effort.
Any movement counts
Any movement counts, because women have a tendency to decide that if they can't do it perfectly, they won't do it at all. Walking the steps or the supermarket aisles adds up, and so does skipping the gym membership and the marathon.
Short bursts
Strenuous exercise can come in small bursts. On a treadmill, every 10 minutes the pace can pick up for 30 seconds. Holding weights or putting the arms in the air raises the heart rate too, and more of the moderate stuff covers the gap for anyone who does less of the strenuous kind.
Why does the talk test track intensity?
Breathing rate rises as exercise gets harder, and past a point it rises faster than the effort does. This point, called the ventilatory threshold, makes speaking in full sentences difficult. A 2004 study in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise, led by Rebecca Persinger, found that the point where talking becomes uncomfortable closely matched the ventilatory threshold measured in a laboratory. This lets conversation serve as a free gauge of effort.
Why do short bursts of hard effort count?
A 2022 study in Nature Medicine by Emmanuel Stamatakis and colleagues used wrist-worn trackers on more than 25,000 UK Biobank participants who did no formal exercise. Those who had a few brief bouts of vigorous activity in daily life, such as hurrying up stairs, had lower death rates over the following years. Short intense efforts push the heart rate and breathing up sharply. Repeated over weeks, intense efforts raise aerobic fitness.
Why does vigorous exercise count double?
Exercise guidelines are built on metabolic equivalents, or METs, which compare energy use against sitting still. Moderate activity falls at about 3 to 6 METs, and vigorous activity falls above 6. Vigorous work burns roughly twice the energy per minute, so the guidelines treat one vigorous minute as equal to two moderate ones. The US federal guidelines have used this exchange rate since 2008.
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