What is Exercise?

Fitness and health for human beings relies on a balance of healthy and nutritious eating and sufficient physical exercise to maintain a healthy body and mind. This page is about the 'exercise' half of that balance.

There are specialist apps for learning how to work out at the gym; since we can attain fitness without working out at the gym, or seeking to develop muscle strength, our focus here is simply and solely on attaining fitness, whether in the gym or elsewhere. Since this regards the study of health, we will reference the work of experts in the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. That will allow users to attain fitness through a multitude of possible physical activities instead of solely through the gym, if the user prefers such.

The Guidelines suggest the following for adults: at least 150 minutes to 300 minutes a week of moderate-intensity, or half of that of vigorous-intensity, aerobic physical activity, with potential additional health benefits beyond that 300 minute/week upper bound. They also recommend muscle-strengthening activities of moderate or greater intensity that involve all major muscle groups on at least 2 days a week for additional health benefits.

The Guidelines track this through units of MET: metabolic equivalent of task, where 1 MET is the rate of energy expenditure at rest. A 4 MET activity expends 4 times the energy used by the body at rest. A MET-minute is a minute of 1 MET activity. With this measure, we passively have 24x60=1440 MET minutes a day. If we define moderate-intensity activities as those with METs between 3 and 6, with vigorous-intensity activities being those with METs greater than 6, then on average, we can re-define the earlier recommendations as being at least 3x150=450 additional MET-minutes a week, with more health benefits gained as we approach 900 additional MET-minutes per week.

The reason this calculation is useful is due to an extensive list of approximate MET values for various tasks listed within the Compendium of Physical Activities. With this, we can try to estimate our current level of weekly fitness and then find suggestions: are there other activities we want to do? We can start with those and increase our physical activity till we reach the Guidelines' recommendations.

How do we develop Exercise?

After learning about our methodology for developing the exercise aspect of fitness, what remains is identifying our current level of exercise fitness and what we need to do to improve it, if necessary. As such, we have a special Tracker for Exercise, created to help identify the MET-minutes across our average weekly activities. This is done through using the Guidelines and Compendium as references to compare to what weekly activities the user inputs, with Google Gemini being used to interpret the user's description of their weekly activities and approximate their MET-minute conversion.

From there, we can identify the level of fitness that the user has attained according to those Guidelines and then help the user identify ways to implement improvements.