They have slipped it on us and it is time to recognize it. For years, the gym boom has been received with enthusiasm: having ubiquitous and accessible sports facilities to get us out of our sedentary routine can only be understood as something positive.
And yet, the way sport has been introduced into our lives is deeply problematic: we have managed to create a “compartmentalized model” of physical activity that is leaking everywhere.
So “going to the gym” doesn’t work? No, it’s not that. It’s not what the evidence says. Intense exercise is helpful. Very useful. And it is always better than doing nothing: but the idea of going to the gym for an hour and that’s it forgets that the relevant unit is not the hour at the gym, but the energy pattern of the 24 hours a day.
Let’s put it another way: Why don’t the Hadza burn more calories than office workers despite walking 12 km a day, why do gym programs to lose weight systematically disappoint, or why has the WHO begun to separate “exercising” from “sitting less”?
The answer to these three questions is the same: the evolutionary biology of the human being.
Two lines of research that converge at the same point. Between 2012 and 2018, a Duke University team led by Pontzer discovered that the body does not linearly add exercise expenditure to basal expenditure. What it does is compensate for it (reducing expenditure on other vital functions such as inflammatory, reproductive processes or metabolic control).
That is, doing an hour (or more) of intense exercise does not have to increase total energy expenditure.
The second line of research arises from comparing people with the same weight and height. In ’99, the Mayo Clinic discovered that the daily difference in energy expenditure can be attributed to things like walking, standing, housework, and other types of small unconscious movements.
To this we must add that a sedentary lifestyle is, in itself, a risk factor. In 2016, Ekelund and his team found that 60 to 75 minutes a day of moderate physical activity are needed to eliminate the excess mortality risk associated with sitting for 8 hours or more a day.
That is, one hour of exercise does not solve the problem.
And the problem is that the public conversation doesn’t realize it. It is unbalanced: the dominant imagination since the 80s sees doing “a handful of hours of exercise” as a way to “buy” health. The very long debate about how many steps to take each day is exactly the same.
The issue, as I say, is that the evidence is clear that we are not buying anything.
And then? Should we close the gyms? Nothing of the sort. The important thing at this point in 2026 is to begin to understand that the correct unit to think about our physical activity is the full day.
As the WHO says, “more activity is better than little; any activity is better than none; (however) reducing a sedentary lifestyle provides independent benefits” and is worth addressing regardless of the exercise we do.
The idea of ”training for an hour and then spending the rest of the day calmly” does not hold water. Going to the gym is positive, but it is not a papal bull: intense exercise works as something that adds to leaving a sedentary lifestyle. It does not replace it.
Imagen | Anupam Mahapatra
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