Just taking a stroll is not sufficient to maintain and improve health; one must do “vigorous exercise” for at least 20 minutes three times a week to keep fit.

The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association have released the new national guidelines, for the first time in a dozen years, in which experts have updated and clarified national physical activity guidelines which define the minimum physical activity required to maintain good health.

They now want vigorous exercise to be “explicitly” recommended.

The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association fear that their original guidance from 1995, which recommended that adults aged 18-65 engage in at least 30 minutes’ moderate exercise on most days of the week, has been “misinterpreted.”

The proponents of the revised guidelines wrote in the American Heart Association’s scientific journal Circulation: “There are people who have not accepted, and others who have misinterpreted, the original recommendation. Some people continue to believe that only vigorous intensity activity will improve health, while others believe that the lightest activities of their daily lives are sufficient to promote health.”

Experts say that doing something that raises a sweat – such as jogging or twice-weekly weight-training – needs to be added to the list of exercises in order to stave off increasing problems such as heart disease and obesity.

The experts’ original advice was adopted by the government of the United Kingdom in 1996 and still forms the basis of current recommendations – for people to take 30 minutes of moderate exercise at least five times a week.

Sir Liam Donaldson, chief medical officer for England and Wales, had suggested in 2004 that this could be broken down into 10-minute chunks.

The panel of the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association now recommends that people take moderate exercise half an hour at least five days a week, plus vigorous aerobic exercise for at least 20 minutes twice a week, plus two sessions of weight training or another form of muscle-strengthening exercise at least twice a week.

In the second week of August 2007, a study conducted by Queen’s University, Belfast, Ireland, had found that walking for just 30 minutes three times a week can lower blood pressure and risk of heart disease.

World Health Organization has recommended that 30 minutes of gentle exercise each day would be enough to sustain a minimum level of fitness.

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