Exercise every day: is it healthy?

Exercising every day can help you reduce stress and promote your physical health. You can find out here what you should pay attention to and when daily training becomes problematic.

To lead a healthy life, the WHO recommends getting 150 to 300 minutes of moderate exercise per week. Moderate exercise includes, for example, cycling, brisk walking or dancing. Alternatively, you should exercise more intensively for 75 to 150 minutes. This form of exercise includes jogging, swimming, HIIT and cardio workouts.

If you want to do sport every day and move intensively, your workouts only need to be ten to 21 minutes long in order to comply with the WHO recommendations.

Exercise Every Day: Health Benefits

It’s no secret that regular exercise promotes health. Scientific findings confirm that exercise can prevent various diseases and ailments. These include, for example:

• Cardiovascular diseases
• Type II diabetes
• Burnout
• High blood pressure
• Cancer
• osteoporosis

Regular physical activity is particularly important to combat the lack of exercise, especially if you spend a lot of time sitting at a desk or in the car. A study from 2019 confirms that the risk of death increases significantly for people who sit for more than eight hours a day. Exactly how much the risk of death increases depends on other factors (such as age and gender).

Daily exercise can also be problematic

The benefits of regular physical activity are obvious. In addition, a large part of society seems to suffer more from a lack of exercise than from too much training. Many guidelines therefore recommend a minimum amount of exercise and do not set any upper limits. But is it actually healthy to exercise every day?

As is so often the case, the same applies in this case: the dose makes the poison. Moderate exercise promotes your physical and mental health. However, if you overdo it, it can actually harm you and lead to, among other things, sleep disorders, reduced performance, inner restlessness and depression.

Too much exercise can also throw hormones out of balance, especially in women. This can manifest itself, for example, in an irregular cycle or the complete absence of periods.

Where exactly the limit for excessive exercise is is scientifically controversial and can hardly be answered in general terms. Every body is individual and therefore has different needs and limits. Whether it is advisable to do sport every day ultimately depends on what sport you do. Intense interval training challenges your body in a much greater way than a gentle yoga flow.

There is also the psychological component: Sport should not be a compulsion, but should primarily be fun and reduce stress. If you notice that your daily training is putting you under more pressure and you hardly find time for recovery, you should question your training plan.

Other tips and hints

If you want to exercise every day and avoid negative side effects, the following tips can help you:

• Find a sport that you enjoy. This is the only way to ensure that you stay on track in the long term and associate sport with joy and stress relief and not with compulsion.

• Vary the intensity. If you like to exercise every day, it is advisable not to only include high-intensity training sessions and to test your limits every day. Instead, incorporate quieter sequences, for example in the form of quiet yoga flows or walks.

• Listen to your body’s signals. If you notice that you are feeling tired and exhausted from exercising, you should not force yourself to workout just because it is written down in your training plan. Instead, stay flexible and give your body a break when it demands it. This also applies to mild symptoms of illness such as body aches, sore throats or a runny nose.

• Question your motivation. Whether sport is good for you mentally depends largely on your intention. If you only do sport to achieve a certain social body ideal, you are primarily putting yourself under pressure. This can lead to you planning your entire life around your daily exercise sessions, barely having time for friends and family, and ignoring your body’s symptoms of exhaustion. In this case, it can help to take a break from sport and perhaps seek professional help.

• Of course, exercise can also help you lose weight and that doesn’t always have to be associated with toxic self-perception. Nevertheless, you should never neglect your well-being and mental health.