It’s Not About How Long You Exercise: Is One Hour Enough? Guide to One-Hour High Quality Exercise

When it comes to why people don’t exercise or can’t be committed to exercising, a lot of them feel that exercise consumes too much time. A study in the United States and Canada found that 69% of the people believe that the “barrier” to exercise is “I don’t have enough time.”

How to Exercise Efficiently?

For most people, this “exercise time” refers to a complete and continuous period of time. The rough calculation of the round trip from changing clothes and packing and heading to the sports venue, to taking the transportation back home after the exercise is at least 2-3 hours. If you have arrangements afterwards, the schedule would be a bit tight, and we would quite often tell ourselves forget about it and just stay at home!

Efficient exercise is to allow you to avoid spending extra time aside from exercising, and to actually be able to effectively train during the exercise time.

Make Good Use of One Hour, Do Low-Volume, High-Intensity Exercise

Low volume refers to a lower amount of single activity level. As for high intensity, it refers to a higher exercise intensity.

Its principle is to exert full cardiopulmonary function by doing exercises with all your might in a short period of time, for example doing a training set in only a few minutes to less than twenty minutes. If you have a tight schedule and don’t have enough time, and still want to develop the habit of being committed to exercising, then these are a good choice.

There are several significant benefits to this approach, increasing the feasibility for you to “exercise at any time.”

Advantages:

• No need to search for a venue. All we need to do is search for a workout that suits us through an app, and we can start with just simple equipment, such as yoga mats and dumbbells.
• Short Period of Time with Strong Maneuverability: Unlike the stacking up of low/medium-intensity exercises, these exercises don’t need to be planned in advance.
• Effective. Whether it is shaping, improving cardiopulmonary function, or accelerating metabolism, this is more effective.
• Effectively Control Calorie Intake: Because the duration of exercise is short, it generally will not cause a strong sense of hunger.

It’s quite simple to operate. If your device supports the import of workouts, just select a few sports programs within the Garmin Connect App that suits you and import these courses. According to the difficulty level, beginner-intermediate-advanced, there are a total of 50+ workouts included, which can meet the needs of most people.

After you have selected and imported one or more courses that suit you, then you can view each movement step, things to pay attention to, and target muscle groups on Connect.

Or you can import the courses directly into the watch, and after the synchronization is complete, then follow the exercise prompts from the watch to exercise safely and effectively. It will record everything, from how many reps you have done to what movement to do on the next set.

In the Venu and Vivoactive 4 series, you can even see the instruction video within Connect displayed on the watch screen. By following the movement animation instruction displayed on the screen, it is very clear what to do next!

In addition to a single type of exercise, you can also freely arrange and adjust courses through the watch’s body energy monitoring value combined with the pressure index of that day.

When the body energy index is comparatively higher and the pressure index is comparatively lower, you can choose a relatively intensive training, for example: 40 minutes of Pilates + 20 minutes of strength training.

On the contrary, when the body energy index is comparatively lower and the pressure index is comparatively higher, you can choose some light training to avoid excessive consumption of energy, for example: 10 minutes of strength training + 10 minutes of Pilates + 40 minutes of yoga to release stress and conserve your energy!

In addition, you can also arrange according to the body part that you want to train, for example: 30 minutes of full-body power training + 20 minutes of upper limb training + 10 minutes of relaxation. During this period, you can give priority to the items that can work out all your muscles and then focusing on and adjusting for partial muscle groups.

Understanding Exercise Intensity with the Combination of Heart Rate

Studies in recent years have stated that the duration of exercise is not the most important criterion for the effectiveness of exercise. The intensity of exercise that you achieve in a single workout is the key indicator that really determines your workout effectiveness. One of the most important indicators for measuring exercise intensity is heart rate, as different heart rate intervals represent different exercise intensities.

The heart rate interval will vary greatly depending on the individual’s physiological state. We recommend for you to obtain and calculate your heart rate interval value through wearing a device that can monitor heart rate around the clock, thereby obtaining and knowing the effectiveness of exercise more accurately, so you can maintain your exercise heart rate within the required range.

Tips：
1. The heart rate principle is applicable to almost all sports; however, please don’t make a “cross-sport” comparison. Besides the level of metabolism, there are great differences in the technical movements among different sports. You can run easily at a certain heart rate, but if you swim at that same heart rate, your muscles will become very tired.

2. When doing squats, weightlifting, or other strength exercises, your heart rate may have just reached your maximum aerobic heart rate; however, it is still anaerobic in this state. Because during the process of exercising, the body is active for a much shorter period of time than running, the heart rate won’t remain at a stable level, as no one can do squats / weightlifting for a long time.

3. Heart rate varies from person to person and is related to inborn traits, age, exercise habits, etc。. Two people of the same age may have significant differences in heart rates. There is no need to compare with others at this time.

As a result, you can effectively carry out one hour of training without having to leave the house. It is easy to carry out and can help you develop an exercising habit. You can maintain a healthy body state and have a better mental outlook to face even more challenges~