THE EXERCISE PILLAR

We can’t know what we don’t track, and as with our other pillars, tracking your exercise is key to success. Calibrate syncs with most movement trackers—and because these devices measure steps, that’s what you’ll see in your app instead of minutes. 

However, since people move at different speeds and take steps of different sizes, many members choose to count minutes separately and just treat steps as a way to visualize progress. That’s what we recommend, but generally speaking, 150 minutes of exercise translates to about 15,000 steps of walking.

Studies have found that moving after a meal leads to more weight loss than moving before it, and that moving right after that meal is more effective than moving even as little as 30 minutes after. (One reason for this might be that movement keeps your blood sugar low, so you’re less likely to store the energy you just consumed as fat.) 

If you move just five minutes after two meals, you’ll already be hitting 70 minutes per week. But ten minutes after two meals is a particularly powerful number because it gets you to 140 minutes, which means you’re just shy of the 150-minute goal post without any extra planning.  

“Moving” can be anything: walking the dog, running, climbing stairs, basketball with the kids, biking, pilates, swimming, push-ups; there are very few wrong answers. 

Lastly, in addition to weight loss, post-meal movement is a great way to quickly build an exercise practice by anchoring it to something you already automatically do. For additional support locking this habit, print out two of these Cash-Out Cards and use them for two weeks. 

• Getting strong is about getting healthy, and muscle improves insulin sensitivity and burns three times more energy than fat. 
• Resistance training is a great way to build that muscle, and it’s defined as moving your body against a force that pushes back. The time you spend resistance training counts toward your 150 or more minutes, and if you resistance train after meals it counts toward that part of the Exercise Program Goal, too. 
• Weights, push-ups, bands, yoga, pilates, and more are all forms of resistance training. As for what’s defined as a session, make sure to hit each major muscle group—quads, hamstrings, abs, shoulder, back, biceps, and triceps—at least once.
• Starting in this level, we’ll introduce a resistance circuit from Exercise Expert Adam Rosante. Want some more ideas? We have a growing library of videos from both our exercise experts with tons of effective, adjustable motions for you to incorporate into your resistance training workouts. 

At nine months, if you’re still not hitting at least 150 minutes, including two or more resistance training sessions, we can hone in on the best tools to help (spoiler: getting to ten minutes after meals can really help). 

If you’ve met or surpassed that goal, keep going. Studies have shown benefits to stretching to 200 minutes and beyond; and the more strength training you do, the more fat you’ll lose versus lean body mass. 

But this is also a good time to look at your movement as a whole. Studies have shown sedentary behavior (spending large portions of your day sitting) is associated with less weight loss and increased likelihood of weight regain even when other levels of physical activity are high. You can address this by “decreasing your efficiency” as you move around the world. This means finding ways to add more movement to daily tasks—parking far from the store, taking the stairs, and using tiny scraps of time for movement.

See this guide, and this one, for ideas.

Once you know what to do, it’s about making yourself do it, consistently. We know that can be the hard part. Now’s the time to identify (and write down!) the things that help you out, trip you up, and everything you can do to make your habit stick. You can use this information to set new goals within the app to keep you moving forward.