The greatest health benefit from exercise comes from getting up off the couch

"There is a catch. The person who is likely to benefit the most from increasing exercise time is probably not you, but instead your pudgy uncle Clarence or that pasty kid next door who’s never met an online orc he couldn’t slay . “The greatest health benefit from exercise comes from getting up off the couch, ” says exercise physiologist Timothy Church, Ph.D. , a professor at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center , in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, who has studied exercise dosing extensively.

“Everything after that is incremental .”The health benefits of activity follow, in fact, a breathtakingly steep curve at first. “ Almost all of the mortality reductions are due to the first 20 minutes of exercise, ” says Frank Booth, Ph.D. , a professor of biomedical sciences at the University of Missouri and much-cited expert on exercise and health. “There’s a huge drop in mortality rates among people who haven’t been doing any activity and then begin doing some, even if the amount of exercise is quite small . ” In a recent meta-analysis of studies about exercise and mortality conducted by scientists at the University of Cambridge and others, the authors found that in general a person’s risk of dying prematurely from any cause plummeted by nearly 20 percent if he or she began to meet the current exercise guidelines of 150 minutes of moderate activity per week, compared with someone who didn’t exercise.

If , however , someone almost tripled that minimum level , completing about 90 minutes a day of exercise four or five times a week, the researchers wrote, his or her risk of premature death dropped still further, but only by another 4 percent."