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Wellness Wednesday for October 12, 2022

The Wednesday Wellness threads are meant to encourage users to ask for and provide advice and motivation to improve their lives. It isn't intended as a 'containment thread' and any content which could go here could instead be posted in its own thread. You could post:

  • Requests for advice and / or encouragement. On basically any topic and for any scale of problem.

  • Updates to let us know how you are doing. This provides valuable feedback on past advice / encouragement and will hopefully make people feel a little more motivated to follow through. If you want to be reminded to post your update, see the post titled 'update reminders', below.

  • Advice. This can be in response to a request for advice or just something that you think could be generally useful for many people here.

  • Encouragement. Probably best directed at specific users, but if you feel like just encouraging people in general I don't think anyone is going to object. I don't think I really need to say this, but just to be clear; encouragement should have a generally positive tone and not shame people (if people feel that shame might be an effective tool for motivating people, please discuss this so we can form a group consensus on how to use it rather than just trying it).

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This may be an annoyingly vague question, but is there any consensus in the running/fitness world as to what the 'minimum viable distance' per week for running is, in terms of improved mood, better sleep and other health benefits?

At the moment I'm managing to fit in around 3km on a treadmill 2-3 times per week after my resistance workout, and I'm wondering if this is enough.

The scientific evidence points to 21-30 minutes of cardio per session. See here for a screenshot of the relevant table.

Edit: the usual caveats apply to interpreting meta moderator analysis.

/u/Walterodim

Unfortunately, I have no idea. I would tend to think it's going to be so individual that it's hard to sort out and I don't think there's anything special about running relative to other cardio-intensive sports. I guess I'd just keep doing more until I felt like I was getting what I wanted!