Conditioning Recommendation Ranges

Hey guys - appreciated the conditioning series you recently did on the podcast. I feel like I have a pretty solid understanding of it and have been doing a decent job fitting this into my regular training.

Forgive me if this was explained in the podcast (you know how it is, you zone out at times), but the one thing I couldn’t wrap my head around was the wide range in recommendations. The difference between 150 and 300 minutes (or 75-150 of High Intensity) is pretty broad. Right now my average weekly total between the two modalities combined is somewhere between 170 and 200, depending on the week.

I guess my question is, what do we understand about the added benefits on say, the difference between doing 300 minutes per week and just reaching the minimum threshold of 150? I imagine the guidance here is if you can get closer to 300, great if you have the time and aren’t sacrificing on your resistance training, but no worries if you can’t pull that off?

Thanks in advance!

Dylan,

Great question. The simple answer is that the more exercise someone does per week, the better their fitness and health tend to be. I agree that 150 min/wk is likely too low to maximize health benefits, as is 300 min/wk. Rather, I think these are the volume levels (for conditioning) that reliably produce a significant benefit in health and fitness. Below these levels there is some benefit, for sure, but I would predict the benefits to be smaller. If you had all the time in the world and were solely focused on maximizing health and performance, you’d likely be doing a lot more than 300 min/wk of conditioning.

Hope this helps!

-Jordan