Which is better?

donrhummy

I've seen a ton of studies that say it's important for your health to get at least 30 minutes of exercise every day, but I've never seen a study that looked at whether 3 hours of exercise 4x/week (for a total of 12 hours) was better/worse/the-same as 1hr 42 min 7x/week (total again of 12 hours).

In other words, the same total time of exercise but one includes days off. Of course there are other factors as well: rest/recuperation, intensity, etc, but does anyone know of any studies that compared these types of schedules?

BeaconRuth

I'm not sure why anyone would bother doing such a study if their interest was in general health. The amount you're talking about is way beyond Joe Average's activity levels. The only people likely to be doing 12hrs a week of any kind of exercise are fairly serious sportsmen and women and so any study on that volume of training will probably sport-specific.

If you're talking about cycling then IMO it's always a good idea to have at least one day off a week. I've no scientific evidence for this ( )( in-joke, sorry :oops: ) but to me it just seems good common sense to give your body a rest once in a while.

Ruth

nolf

Rest...

Something I've started doing...

Surprisingly easy once you get used to it....

Alex_Simmons/RST

BeaconRuth wrote:

If you're talking about cycling then IMO it's always a good idea to have at least one day off a week. I've no scientific evidence for this ( )( in-joke, sorry :oops: ) but to me it just seems good common sense to give your body a rest once in a while.

There's plenty of evidence to show inadequate rest/recovery is detrimental to performance. At least day a week is generally a good thing.

There are some occasions when competitive level cyclists would go longer without a recovery day.