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Getting exercise in as much as you can is almost always going to be great for your health. If you’re getting into running, finding the time to do it can often be a struggle in our busy lives. Luckily the research shows that even running 20 minutes a day can have some fantastic health benefits. So what exactly are they?
Running for 20 minutes a day could offer these 8 amazing benefits:
- Weight Loss
- Increased Life Expectancy
- Improved Memory
- Improved Mood
- Improved Sleep
- Improved Heart Health
- Decreased Stress
- Increased Overall Fitness
Weight Loss
Ok, I know. The idea that exercise helps us lose weight is pretty common knowledge. But, like me, you’re probably wondering if only 20 minutes of running here and there is enough to have an impact. Luckily, the answer is yes.
As a basic rule of thumb, the average person burns around 100 calories for every mile they run. In addition to this, Healthline has pointed out that the average runner can usually complete a marathon in around nine or ten minutes. So it’s not out of the question to say that the typical person running for 20 minutes a day could be expected to burn as much as 200 calories!
Don’t get me wrong, losing weight would probably be very difficult with just running 20 minutes a day alone. You would almost definitely want to combine it with a few other kinds of exercises as well as a healthy diet. However, the benefits don’t stop at calories. Many studies have proven that running can suppress appetite, meaning that, surprisingly, you may feel less hungry after running than you did before.
If that wasn’t enough, running could directly target visceral fat (belly fat), which is known to contribute to several health problems. Trust me, if you’re looking at dropping a few pounds, then running 20 minutes a day could be a great place to start.
Increased Life Expectancy
I honestly found this benefit the most surprising. A recent study from The Lancet suggests that exercising for at least 15 minutes a day was the minimum amount of exercise needed to increase life expectancy by three years.
The study was carried out with a focus on the current exercise guidelines, which recommend exercising for 150 minutes a week. The objective was to discover some of the benefits of exercising for less than the recommended amount of time as there appeared to be a lack of research in this area.
During this study, over 140 000 men and women were asked to submit regular questionnaires over a 12 year period, which reported the amount of exercise they were doing. By doing so, the study calculated mortality rates by grouping participants based on the amount of exercise they were doing and then comparing them with an inactive group.
The findings show that by getting in as little as 15-minute exercise sessions a day or 90 minutes of exercise a week, people can reduce their mortality rate by 14% and increase life expectancy by three years. If that is what we can achieve by 15 minutes of exercise, just imagine what could be done with running 20 minutes a day.
Improved Memory
Running 20 minutes a day can do incredible things for your mind. Studies show that regular physical exercise is one of the ways that people can help keep their memory in check. In fact, it has been found that regular exercise can cause a direct benefit to the hippocampus, the part of the brain responsible for memory.
This research is probably most useful to individuals who are in high-risk categories for problems with memory. One study looking into this focused specifically on people in their mid-forties. It found that consistent physical activity during this part of life could potentially preserve not only memory but also learning abilities. It’s important to note that these findings were based upon the memory functions of nine-month-old mice rather than people.
By leaving one group of mice equipped with a running wheel and one group of mice without, the researchers revisited the mice at 15 months of age. The findings suggested that long term running at middle age helped the mice maintain highly functional memory skills in later life.
Furthermore, it appears that whilst regular running can help you keep your current memory in check, it can also help prevent memory-related diseases. Another animal-based study that focused on treadmill running suggested that regular running was something that could offer protection against diseases like Alzheimers.
Improved Mood
From personal experience, I can say with my hand on my heart that running 20 minutes a day has done amazon things for my mood. I think a lot of it could just be a change of environment. Sitting down at a desk, as I do for eight hours a day, is definitely enough to leave you feeling as if you need a change of scenery.
The fresh air and the opportunity to move about after sitting cooped up definitely helps perk me up. In fact, these days, I schedule my runs to go out and complete a 5K during my lunch break; doing so leaves me feeling a lot more positive about my work ahead in the afternoon. I guess you could call this my ‘runners high’?
That being said, you don’t need to take my word for it. According to Hopkins Medicine, running can cause real changes in your body, leaving you feeling in a much better mood. Apparently, as we begin running, our body releases hormones known as endorphins. These offer a short but powerful euphoric effect that can leave us feeling much more positive following a run. Running 20 minutes a day may also leave you feeling calmer and less anxious due to chemical substances in the body known as endocannabinoids which can easily move through the barrier that separates the bloodstream from the brain.
Improved Sleep
This is another benefit that I have found personally useful after running. When I decide to run 20 minutes a day, I find that I tend to push myself a lot harder due to the short time that I’m constricted to. The result usually means that even though it’s been a short run, I could sleep for hours upon finishing it. Once again, the research that’s out there seems to back up my personal experience.
According to experts, it is not 100% understood why we seem to sleep better after exercising. However, it has been found that aerobic exercise (like running 20 minutes a day) has been proven to elevate the amount of deep sleep we get.
Another interesting point is that if we want to get a decent night’s rest, we may also have to be careful about the time that we choose to exercise due to the effects running has on the brain. Although it’s great that we feel happy and upbeat following the endorphin release caused by a run, this can still cause us to remain awake. Running before bed can also be problematic if the bodies core temperature rises as you could end up trying to sleep whilst hot and bothered.
It’s important to remember that the recommendation to get benefits for sleep may require more exercise than simply running for 20 minutes. At this point in time, experts appear to be recommending at least 30 minutes of aerobic exercise.
Improved Heart Health
Perhaps one of the biggest benefits of getting in your daily dose of running is the benefits that regular exercise can have on your heart. There is an insane amount of research out there that points to typical aerobic exercise being great for the overall health of your heart.
According to Bronson Health, running is one of the optimal ways to help strengthen the heart. By continuously running over a period of time, the walls of your heart get stronger. This can help increase your heart’s overall efficiency and, therefore, can mean a lower resting heart rate and a higher intake of oxygen. Basically, your heart becomes better at doing its job.
Although this sounds great, there is also a lot of research out there suggesting that running too much can also leave you no better off in terms of heart health than somebody who does no running at all.
The European Heart Journal published a study looking into both the good and bad roles that aerobic activity can have on a person’s heart. It found that over time, long-distance running can potentially cause some heart-related problems, including arrhythmias and myocardial fibrosis. Although the heart could become damaged from long-distance running, there could still be many benefits from running 20 minutes a day.
Decreased Stress
This one is probably expected, considering that we have already found that running regularly can help increase our overall mood and sleep. But it’s important to recognise the extensive research that has found the unique links between running and reduced stress.
According to Harvard Health, even 20 minutes worth of walking can be enough to see a decrease in stress. Although stress is largely emotional and therefore is best handled by gaining an insight into why you are stressed, it is also something that can have a great physical impact on the body and so is something that can also be tackled with daily aerobic activities (such as 20 minutes of running a day, for example).
Another way that running 20 minutes a day can reduce stress may be through preventing illness. Whilst there is excellent evidence out there showing what regular running does to our bodies, it’s also important to think about what it prevents. Regular running is something that can help boost our immune systems and keep us from getting sick. It’s not out of the question to think that becoming ill can be a direct cause of emotional stress in our day to day lives. If becoming ill is something you’d like to avoid in the first place, running 20 minutes a day is a fantastic place to start.
Increased Overall Fitness
Through personal experience, I have noticed that it’s not uncommon that once you begin running for 20 minutes a day, you may feel more enthusiastic about increasing your overall fitness. As you take note of the benefits that you receive from carrying out short periods of aerobic activity, you will likely begin to take note of other aspects of your life where overall health could be improved.
For me, after I began running 20 minutes a day, I began to take more notice of the foods that I was eating. I began to push for healthier meals as I realised that the combination of a good diet and regular exercise left me feeling much more upbeat. Running 20 minutes a day has also pushed me to carry out other types of exercise, such as going swimming lengths or pumping iron.
Most importantly, after running 20 minutes a day, my overall fitness improved as I began to slightly increase the amount of time I spent running to thirty minutes a day. Whilst there were many benefits associated with running just 20 minutes a day, I noticed there were to be gained by increasing my exercise slightly.
Conclusion
It’s amazing to think that running 20 minutes a day can have such a huge impact on your life. The immediate effects that running can have on your physical and mental wellbeing means that anyone with a third of an hour on their hands can start feeling great today. What’s more, daily running over a longer period of time can do incredible things for your learning and memory abilities, your heart and much, much more. Hopefully, starting exercise small will push you to live a healthier lifestyle in general.
