If you want to lose weight, ideally your workout will include both high intensity and moderate intensity levels. Bailey points to an update from the American College of Sports Medicine on the role of exercise in obesity treatment that says exactly that. One study that compared 12 weeks of high-intensity interval training to moderate-intensity continuous training showed they had similar weight loss outcomes. With this in mind, all three experts say that what matters most is consistency—and that’s often easier to maintain with moderate intensity workouts.
3. Moderate intensity exercise supports mental health
Dr. Boynton and Bailey both say that the relationship between moderate intensity exercise and mental health is complicated (because it’s tricky to accurately measure mental health, for one), but the scientific research in this area, which is vast, suggests a connection. There are a few different reasons for this. One is because it supports overall brain health, which affects moods. Angelino explains that moderate intensity exercise results in better blood flow to the brain because the heart is pumping blood out faster than when the body is at rest. This supports everything the brain is involved in, including cognition, memory, and yes, mental health.
Angelino also points out that completing a workout leads to a sense of accomplishment, which can also make you feel good. A new study even showed that regular moderate intensity exercise can help reduce workplace burnout, partly for this reason.
4. It could help reduce chronic pain
While in graduate school, Angelino conducted research about the connection between moderate intensity exercise and chronic pain management. While he found that the outcome largely depends on the source of one’s chronic pain, he also discovered that for certain types of pain, it can be effective. “The two big advantages that moderate intensity exercise has over high intensity exercise when addressing pain is that moderate intensity exercise is less likely to make the pain worse, and you can perform moderate intensity exercise at a higher volume. Both are important because doing so much that you re-injure tissues in your body moves you in the opposite direction of where you want to be going,” he says.
Angelino explains that being able to exercise for a longer period of time allows for more blood to be delivered to the tissues in the body you’re targeting, which improves muscular endurance. “This is important for [managing] some of the most common sources of chronic pain,” he says. Scientific research backs this up, showing that moderate intensity exercise can help with managing chronic pain types including rheumatoid arthritis, osteoarthritis, low-back pain, and neck pain.
5. It can help you live longer
Regular, moderate intensity exercise changes the body at a cellular level, which increases lifespan. Bailey explains that when muscles extract oxygen during moderate intensity exercise, it increases the amount of mitochondria, which are responsible for producing cells’ energy. We naturally lose mitochondria as we age, so when more are formed during exercise, it slows the rate of cellular aging.
It bears repeating that high, moderate, and low intensity exercise are all important. So is complete rest and recovery. Working out doesn’t require an all-or-nothing mentality. In fact, that shouldn’t be how you approach it. If you’ve been skipping moderate intensity and going hard every single workout the entire time, consider this a sign to rethink your approach.
