5 Easy Ways to Get Started With Exercise

The way to start exercising is to pick something small enough that you will do it tomorrow as well. Ten minutes of walking most days beats an ambitious plan you abandon in a fortnight. What follows is the version for people starting from nothing, with no gym and no equipment.

How much exercise should you start with?

Less than you think. Ten minutes a day is a real starting point, and it does not have to be ten minutes at once. A five-minute walk in the morning and another in the evening counts.

The point of starting this small is not the ten minutes. It is building the habit of showing up, which is the part most people lose. Once the habit holds for a few weeks, adding to it is easy.

Regular activity is associated with lower stress, better sleep and more energy through the day. Those effects show up gradually and they are the reason to keep going once the novelty wears off.

What kind of movement actually counts?

All of it. Walking, stairs, gardening, carrying shopping, playing with children. There is no threshold below which movement stops mattering, and the idea that only structured workouts count keeps a lot of people from starting at all.

How do you add strength training without a gym?

Bodyweight work is strength training. Squats, push-ups against a wall or a counter, sit-to-stands from a chair, and carrying something heavy across a room all load the muscles enough to matter when you are starting out.

Household objects work as weights. A milk jug, a tin, a bag of rice. When those stop feeling like anything, that is the signal to make the movement harder rather than to buy equipment.

Strength work is worth including alongside walking because it loads bone as well as muscle, which matters more as you get older. Two or three sessions a week is a common pattern and there is nothing magic about the number.

How much cardio do you actually need?

Anything that raises your heart rate and holds it there counts, and it does not have to happen at a gym. A brisk walk, a hill, a flight of stairs taken twice.

Aerobic activity is one of the better-studied things you can do for cardiovascular health. If you have a heart condition, high blood pressure, or you have been inactive for a long stretch, ask your clinician what is reasonable before you push the intensity up.

What about drinking water?

Water regulates body temperature, lubricates joints and carries waste out through sweat and urine. Dehydration can show up as fatigue, muscle cramps and headache, which are easy to mistake for being unfit.

Thirst is a reasonable guide for most healthy adults. Drink when you are thirsty, drink more when it is hot or when you have been working hard, and choose water over sugary drinks. Fixed daily targets get quoted a lot and they vary by body size, climate and activity, so treat them as rough at best.

If you take a diuretic, a medication for blood pressure, or lithium, your fluid needs are a question for your prescriber rather than a general rule.

Why do rest days matter?

Adaptation happens during recovery, not during the session. Training every day without a break tends to produce fatigue and niggling injuries rather than faster progress, particularly in the first few months.

Build rest in deliberately rather than waiting until something hurts. A day off, or a day of walking instead of training, is part of the plan and not a failure of it.

What if you are sore or your joints hurt?

Muscle soreness a day or two after new activity is ordinary and settles on its own. Pain that is sharp, sits inside a joint, appears during the movement rather than after it, or lasts beyond a few days is different and worth a call to a clinician.

Where a clinician decides a topical preparation is appropriate for persistent muscle or joint pain, a compounded topical pain cream is one of the things they can order, prepared for a named patient at the ingredients and strengths they specify. Compounded preparations are not FDA-approved, and whether one is appropriate is the prescriber's decision.

Talk to your prescriber

If you have a heart or lung condition, joint disease, diabetes, or you are returning after an injury or surgery, talk to your clinician before you start rather than after something goes wrong. Bayview Pharmacy does not provide consultations and does not decide what is appropriate for you.

The other half of starting is what you eat, and it is the part with the most noise around it. Our guide to nutrition basics keeps to the parts that are settled.

If you are also being sold something for energy or immunity to go with the new routine, our review of what the evidence says about immune supplements is worth reading first.

And if a prescriber does order something prepared for you, our explainer on how a compounding pharmacy differs from a retail pharmacy covers what that involves.