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Exercise is a healthy and, one might argue, necessary part of our lives. The guidelines from public health organizations tell you to aim for at least 150 minutes of “moderate” exercise each week, and that each minute of “vigorous” exercise counts double. That raises the question: What the hell is “moderate” exercise? How do you know when you’re doing it?
Moderate exercise is sometimes conflated with “zone 2” exercise. These two things aren’t exactly the same, but they do overlap a bit. I’ll get into the difference below. Moderate exercise includes activities like walking and casual bicycling, and it counts whether you think of it as a workout or not. Getting enough moderate exercise has benefits for your heart, metabolism, mental health, and more—so let’s dig in to what it is and how you can know when you’re doing it.
Scientists measure METs, but you don’t have to
If you use a fitness tracker like the Fitbit Air, it may try to tell you that “moderate” exercise occurs when you reach a certain heart rate. This isn’t actually the case. The scientists who came up with the exercise guidelines didn’t use heart rate as their guide. Instead, they used charts that measured how many “METs,” or metabolic equivalents, each type of exercise requires.
I’ll explain more about METs below, but the important thing to know is that the type and intensity of exercise is what tells you whether it’s moderate, not your heart rate while you’re doing it. You can look up exercises on a chart like this one, but here’s the basic idea:
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Walking is moderate exercise; jogging or running is vigorous.
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Bicycling is moderate if it’s under about 12 miles per hour on the flat.
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Indoor cycling is moderate if it’s up to about 100 watts of power.
You don’t have to overthink it. The guidelines that mention “moderate” and “vigorous” activities aren’t asking you to monitor your heart rate or any other numeric metric. They want you thinking in terms of generalities: walking versus running, leisurely bike commuting versus sweating your heart out in a spin studio.
And honestly, if it’s easier to watch your heart rate than to worry about the above, that’s fine. For most of us, 150 minutes of Zone 2 is going to be at least 150 minutes of moderate exercise. So follow that guideline, and you’ll be an overachiever.
It’s not really about heart rate
So why does your watch want to steer you toward a certain heart rate during exercise? Mostly because that’s easy to measure. Moderate exercise sorta-kinda matches up to “zone 2” cardio, which I’ve previously explained. (Zone 2 is is the second-lowest intensity in a five-zone system, and the easiest way to know which zone you’re in is to glance at your fitness watch.)
While you can use heart rate zones as a rule of thumb to find moderate exercise, this idea falls short in two ways: (1) different gadgets and systems use different cutoffs to decide which numbers count as “zone 2”, and (2) for most of us, zone 2 includes most moderate activities but also some vigorous activities. If you’re relatively fit, you can jog at a 12 minute-per-mile pace while keeping your heart rate in zone 2. That’s a “vigorous” activity in terms of METs, though.
The other reason heart rate isn’t accurate for this task is that your heart rate changes for all kinds of reasons. The hotter it is when you’re working out, the higher your heart rate tends to be. Same goes for when you’re nervous or stressed. And as you get fitter, you’ll be able to do the same activities at a lower heart rate. Those activities might feel easier than they used to, but they’re not any less work.
What is a MET, anyway?
One MET is the energy expended when you’re at rest—the amount of oxygen, calories, etc that it takes to keep you alive and breathing. (We use oxygen in the process of burning calories, so officially a MET is 3.2 milliliters of oxygen per kilogram of body weight per minute.)
Researchers can then put a mask on a person and measure how much oxygen they use while running, walking, playing guitar, etc. If an activity takes twice as much oxygen as sitting still, they say it takes two METs. Here are a few examples (taken from this scientific paper):
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2 MET: washing dishes, or playing croquet
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3 MET: walking at 3 miles per hour (a pretty typical walking pace)
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4 MET: table tennis, ice skating
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5 MET: modern dance, fast-paced ballroom dance
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6 MET: volleyball, singles tennis
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7 MET: jogging, jumping rope
The numbers go up from there. Speed skating clocks in at 15 MET. To be clear, you will not be measuring METs directly when you exercise. The MET studies are done in labs so that we can use the information to get a sense of what MET values each common type of exercise tends to have.
Moderate exercise is 3 to 6 MET, and vigorous is 6 or more
The physical activity guidelines define “moderate” exercise as at least 3 MET, but less than 6. Vigorous is 6 MET or more. Because METs are specific to the activity, not to how fit you are, it makes the most sense to look at METs in terms of the pace you run or the settings you use on your treadmill or other cardio machine. Here are paces and activities that have been clocked as between 3 and 6 METs:
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Walking at 3-4 mph (a 15-minute to 20-minute mile)
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Cycling, between 50 to 100 watts
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Shooting baskets
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Playing baseball
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Taking a low-impact aerobics class
And these are vigorous (6 or more MET):
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Race walking (5+ mph)
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Walking uphill
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Walking with a 12-pound pack
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Jogging (a 12-minute mile is 8.0 MET; the faster you go, the higher the MET)
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Bicycling at 12 miles per hour or faster
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Swimming laps
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Playing a game of basketball, soccer, or hockey
So when you’re trying to get your 150 minutes (or more) of moderate exercise each week, you can count all your walking, your easy bike riding, and your low-impact aerobics class. Give yourself credit for vigorous exercise for all the time you spend jogging (at any heart rate), lap swimming, or rucking. You may find you’ve been doing more exercise than you think.
