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Many of us lead busy lives, juggling work, family, hobbies and more. We all know that exercise is important but finding the time can be a challenge. The good news is that even short bursts of vigorous exercise can have significant health benefits. If you can spare just a few minutes today, you can make a positive impact on your well-being. Taking care of your own health is one of the best things you can do for your loved ones.

Rhonda Patrick posted an episode on her Found My Fitness podcast on the best type of exercise for health outcomes in December 2025.

The episode is 2 hours long, making it difficult to recall what we’ve learned from it and to revisit the key points in order to review our action plan. Here we attempt to provide a quick summary on the episode whenever we want to refresh our minds on this topic.

The information in this blog is for general informational purposes only and is not intended as medical or professional health advice. Always seek the guidance of your doctor or a qualified healthcare provider regarding any medical condition or treatment.

Key Takeaways

There are 2 main takeaways from this episode:

1. vigorous activities, not matter how short, even just for 1 minute, can deliver health benefit

2. all vigorous movements count, including running for your train or carrying heavy groceries

It does not matter how busy you are, if you can spare just a few minutes each day for exercising, it will still likely deliver great health benefits. It would be unreasonable for anyone to say that they can’t even spare 2 minutes. Many of us struggle to block out a time in our busy schedule for exercise, but the episode is essentially saying that we don’t have to, we can sprinkle short bouts of vigorous exercises throughout the day and reap huge benefits.

Even better, activities that you may never have thought of as exercise count as exercise too.

Background

The current guideline recommends that the general population aged 18 years or over should aim to do:

• at least 1.25–2.5 hours (75–150 minutes) of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, or
• at least 2.5–5 hours (150–300 minutes) of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity

Here we can see that the guideline implies a ratio of 1 to 2 between vigorous and moderate intensity exercise, that is, 1 minute of vigorous exercise is equivalent to 2 minutes of moderate exercise.

Rhonda Patrick’s episode is saying that the recommendation is only correct for calculating calories burnt, and not for health outcomes, which is more like a ratio of 1 to 4. One minute of vigorous exercise is equivalent to 4 minutes of moderate exercise.

Questions

1. What did the study look at when it refers to health outcomes?
2. What are the definitions of vigorous, moderate and light intensity activities?
3. How do the different intensities compare in terms of health outcomes? How many minutes do I have to do in the different intensities to achieve the same percentage in risk reduction?

1. Health Outcomes

What exactly are we looking at when we talk about health outcomes?

• all-cause mortality
• cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality
• major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE)
• type 2 diabetes
• cancer mortality
• cancer incidence

2. Definition of Vigorous vs Moderate vs Light intensity

There are different ways to define the intensity of an activity, such as:

• METs, or metabolic equivalent of task
• heart rate zones, with zone 1 being light, zone 2 being moderate, and zone 4 being high intensity
• talk test: how much can you talk while doing the exercise?

But Rhonda Patrick pointed out in the episode and in her summary page that

• Vigorous in this study is not just all-out HIIT; it's anything in the moderately hard range—roughly what many would call zone 2 and above, depending on fitness
• The study captures all types of movement, not just formal workouts. Heavy carrying, vigorous housework, and sprinting with your dog can all show up as vigorous efforts.

The study provides a diagram with activity examples for each level of intensity.

• if you’re sitting around or lying down, it’s sedentary, not physical activity.
• if you’re standing doing ironing or the dishes, it’s light activity.
• if you’re doing gardening or commuting, it could vary in intensity and could either be light, moderate or vigorous
• if you’re running, chasing your kids or dog, it’s probably vigorous

Comparison

The study provides 6 graphs, one for each of the 6 risks being tracked. The lower the hazard ratio, the better the health outcome.

• Vigorous physical activities is dose responsive up to around 30-40 minutes per day.
• Moderate physical activities is also dose responsive up to roughly 50 minutes.
• Light physical activities do not seem to be dose responsive.

Here is a table showing how many minutes of moderate and light activities is required to achieve the same risk reduction as one minute of vigorous activity.

Median equivalence (minutes)	Vigorous	Moderate	Light
All-cause mortality	1	4.09	52.65
Cardiovascular disease (CVD) mortality	1	7.78	72.47
Major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE)	1	5.44	86.13
Type 2 Diabetes	1	9.40	94.03
Physical activity related cancer mortality	1	3.47	156.23
Physical activity related cancer incidence	1	1.63	5.09

Why?

Rhonda Patrick and her guest offered a few potential explanations in the podcast. Just listing them very briefly here:

• arteries adapting to and improving flexibility from the sheer stress from faster blood flow during vigorous exercise
• the sheer stress can also kill circulating cancer cells
• stronger heart, higher stroke volume, increasing Vo2 max
• glucose regulation
• Anti-inflammatory response
• lactate generating signals get into the brain and it’s a signal molecule for brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF)
• vigorous activities train your type 2 or fast twitch muscle fibre, which is responsible for when you trip and need to catch yourself to prevent falling and breaking a bone

Action Plan

How do we apply what we’ve learned from this study to our own daily life to improve our health outcomes?

If you’re not already doing so, try to incorporate several bouts of vigorous activities throughout your day.

It could be structured exercises, such as doing jumping jacks or burpees for 2 minutes.

But VILPA, Vigorous Intermittent Lifestyle Physical Activity, count too. Running for the bus, chasing your kids around the backyard, carrying heavy groceries, any movement that speeds up your heart and breathing.

If you’re already doing some light or moderate activities, then think about how you could incorporate vigorous sessions into it. For example, if you take your dog out for a stroll everyday, maybe pick up the pace and run with your dog for a few minutes at intervals.

Importantly, pick something you can stick to and be consistent over the long term.

Caveats

Having said all that, there are a few caveats that we need to keep in mind when interpreting the study:

• This is an observational study, not a randomised controlled trial, so it can only prove correlation and not causation. However, that alone is not a reason to write off the study entirely. It’s okay to be a bit skeptical, but always keep an open mind and do your own research before jumping to conclusion.
• The study was conducted based on the UK Biobank data, which is a prospective cohort study involving adults aged 40–69 at baseline (2006–10). The mean age of participants was 61.6 years. Obviously there may be some differences for people who are in a different age group.
• Our takeaway from the study and the podcast is that we should incorporate some vigorous activities into our daily movement, if we are not already doing so. They are NOT saying that we should cut out all light and moderate activities that we are already doing.
• Don’t overdo high intensity activities.

References

Wearable device-based health equivalence of different physical activity intensities against mortality, cardiometabolic disease, and cancer

Rhonda Patrick - Found My Fitness - Summary