The Right Amount of Exercise to Protect Your Heart

Your daily half-hour exercise session might not be enough to keep your heart healthy, according to a new meta-analysis published in the journal Circulation. After analyzing the exercise habits of almost 400,000 people from 12 studies, the researchers discovered that those who followed the recommended guideline of working out for 30 minutes a day only lowered their risk for heart failure by 10 percent—what they described as just a “modest” reduction.

But people who worked out for an hour cut their odds almost 20 percent.

And those who found the time to sweat it out for two hours a day? They slashed their risk by 35 percent.

That’s fantastic—if you have two hours a day to work out. But in reality, it’s hard enough to find the time to exercise each day, let alone for multiple hours in a row.

So here’s what you can do instead: Make your short workouts harder.

While the researchers didn't specifically look at intensity in the study, they believe performing 30 minutes of intervals—like sprints—can be more effective in protecting against heart failure than doing a moderate workout—like a jog—for the same amount of time, says lead study author Ambarish Pandey, M.D., a cardiology fellow at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School.

Here’s why: Interval training—workouts that alternate between high-intensity effort and lower-intensity effort—causes your heart rate to stay up for short bouts of time and then go back down over and over again.

This “up-and-down” format is what ultimately strengthens your heart. That’s because it forces the muscle to work harder than if it had to consistently maintain the same steady beats per minute.

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