Research

Energy balance

The dose-response relationship between physical activity and health outcomes exhibits diminishing returns, where the greatest risk reduction occurs when moving from inactivity to moderate activity, rather than from moderate to high activity.

Don't be discouraged if you don't see massive additional benefits by doubling your exercise time. The most critical health improvements happen when you go from doing nothing to doing something. Once you reach the recommended 150 minutes, you are already getting the vast majority of the protective benefit against heart disease and diabetes.

StrongQualifiesHIGH confidence
In general, we noted that the greatest rate of reduction occurs in the first category, that is, as you move from low to medium amounts of PA rather than from medium to high.
Ahad Wahid et al. · Journal of the American Heart Association · 2016

Why this rating

Derived from the same robust meta-analysis using a continuous metric.

Source

Quantifying the Association Between Physical Activity and Cardiovascular Disease and Diabetes: A Systematic Review and Meta‐Analysis

Ahad Wahid et al. · Journal of the American Heart Association · 2016

DOI 10.1161/jaha.115.002495

Meta-analysis · 36 studiesCited 703×
Read the paper
DOI resolved against Crossref · corpus check 2026-06-10

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