Fit for Life: Activity Levels--Where are you, and where do you want to go?

Hopefully, we’re still early enough in the year that we’re thinking about our New Year’s goals and where we want our health to go. A big part of our health is our activity level, and a lot of New Year’s resolutions revolve around increasing activity level. If you’re struggling with your resolution (statistically, most of us are), it might be time to reevaluate where you’re at and at what level of activity you want to be.

Remember, it’s not always a good thing to push ourselves. And, always consult your doctor before making major lifestyle changes.

So, what are the different levels of activity? You can really get into the weeds with this, and calculating your energy burned and metabolic rate can be a lot for someone who is just looking to pick up a few healthier habits. For that reason, people colloquially have come up with four activity levels: sedentary, lightly active, moderately active and very active.

These categories are typically defined by the amount of exercise you get a week (including the number of days it’s spread across) and the effort of your activity. It’s important to note that activity that takes a minute or two, such as walking from your car to the store or walking to the fridge for a snack, doesn’t really count toward your activity level – we only want to count longer, more effort-intensive activities.

So, how much activity do you need to qualify for each level? It’s not completely set in stone. A lot of consensus falls to sedentary being less than 30 minutes of exercise per week, lightly active being 30-150 minutes of exercise per week (across 3-5 days), moderately active being 150-300 minutes of exercise per week (across 3-5 days), and very active being more than 300 minutes of exercise per week (across, generally, every day of the week).  

There’s also sense that, with each level, the intensity of the exercise is increasing. If we take walking, for example, lightly active walking might be a casual walk around the neighborhood, moderately active walking would be closer to jogging, and very active would mainly only include running. In this way, casually moving back and forth all week at a standing desk wouldn’t get you into the very active category.

What’s the point of all this? Well, it’s easy to say you want to be more active, but if you’re sedentary, do you want to jump into 300 minutes of running each week? And if you’re sedentary, do you need to be exercising every single day to get healthier? Your doctor will have a better idea of what you’re capable of, so if allowable, aiming for the next level of physical activity is a good thing. It’s so easy to burn ourselves out when we try too hard. If you’re lightly active and want to be more active, maybe you don’t need to walk more, maybe you just need to walk faster. The categories aren’t there to beat you up but instead are there to give you some tools to evaluate where you’re at, where you want to be and how to get there.

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