Is two hours of aerobic exercise too much?

There is no one-size-fits-all answer to whether two hours of aerobic exercise is excessive. It all depends on your exercise foundation, intensity control, and body feedback.

This matter is just like eating. A strong man who has been doing manual labor all year round feels that two bowls of rice are not enough in one meal. A girl with a small appetite usually feels full after eating half a bowl. You can't use the "two bowls of rice" standard to go around and say who has eaten too much. My friends who run marathons usually do a two-hour aerobic jog every midweek. The pace is not fast, and they can chat with the people around them throughout the whole process. After half an hour of stretching, there is no delay in going to work. For him, two hours of aerobic training cannot even reach the threshold of high-intensity training. But last month, my cousin, who had been sitting in an office all year round and was out of breath when climbing the third floor, suddenly signed up for a hiking group and walked for two hours on the wild trail. Her heart rate soared to more than 170 during the whole journey and she still had a low fever when she came home at night. Her legs were sore and she didn't even go to work for a whole week. This must be a real overdose.

In fact, there has been no unified conclusion on this issue in the sports science community. Most researchers in the general fitness field will recommend that for people without special needs, daily aerobic control is enough for 40 minutes to 1 hour. After all, the body's cortisol level will gradually increase after more than 1 hour. Not only is it easy to lose muscle, long-term overdose may also reduce immunity, which is not worth the gain. However, scholars who do research on endurance events will feel that as long as the intensity is controlled within the aerobic range of 60%-70% of the maximum heart rate, that is, the level where you can speak complete sentences normally without gasping for breath during exercise, people with a regular training foundation can completely tolerate aerobic exercise for 2 hours or more, and can effectively improve their cardiopulmonary reserve capacity.

To be honest, there is no need for ordinary fitness people to get stuck on the number "2 hours" and struggle with whether it is too much or not. To judge the standard, you have to look at the signals given by the body: if there is no chest tightness, dizziness, or cold sweat during exercise, you just feel a little normal fatigue after taking a bath, and you feel refreshed after a good sleep, even if you do aerobics for three hours at a time, it is not considered excessive. But if you already feel uncomfortable during exercise, and you have to endure it for 2 hours, and you feel tired for several days after the exercise, and even your sleep and appetite are affected, then let alone 2 hours, even 40 minutes is too much for you. By the way, if you don’t have a long-term exercise habit, don’t suddenly rush into 2 hours of aerobic exercise. I saw in the news that someone who usually does not exercise suddenly jumped into 2 hours of aerobics and ended up in the hospital with rhabdomyolysis. This kind of gain outweighs the loss.