How little exercise can you get away with?

If you’re resolving to make 2026 the year you finally get fit, here’s a simple way to ensure you meet your goal: Aim for the minimum.

A growing body of research suggests that the amount of exercise you need to start seeing real health and fitness benefits is surprisingly small and eminently achievable.

The key is an approach researchers call “minimum effective dose” training. It may sound too good to be true, but you really can get stronger, fitter and healthier with bouts of exercise lasting just a few minutes — presuming you’re willing to work hard.

If you are looking for the best results in the least amount of time, here is what you need to know.

Super Short Strength Workouts

Plenty of studies show strength training increases longevity. And it doesn’t take much.

“How much do you have to do to get health benefits? Any amount,” said Patroklos Androulakis-Korakakis, a visiting scholar at Lehman College in New York and author of a forthcoming book, “Train Smarter, Not Longer: The Minimum Effective Dose for Muscular Development.”

A 2022 meta-analysis found that adults who spent just a few minutes a day doing resistance training could reduce the risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease mortality and cancer mortality compared with those who did none.

So a few minutes of pushups or squats at home can improve your health, but can they also make you stronger? Yes, but you have to make the workout count, said James Steele, an exercise physiologist who helped create Britain’s physical activity guidelines.

In a 2021 study, Steele and his colleagues analyzed about 15,000 Dutch gym members (most of whom were new to strength training) who enrolled in a program of one 20-minute workout per week, consisting of five to six repetitions of six exercises. In the first year, they got about 30% stronger.

Research suggests that so long as you are pushing to the point of fatigue (you should feel like you can’t do more than another repetition or two), as little as one hard set per muscle group per week seems to be enough to get meaningful strength gains, Androulakis-Korakakis said, adding that this is true for beginners as well as trained strength athletes.

Believe it or not, how you get there isn’t all that important. If your sets are challenging, you can get similar results from a few heavy reps or a lot of light ones, said Zac Robinson, a postdoctoral researcher at Florida Atlantic University. Free weights, machines, exercise bands and body weight exercises all work.

Minimum effective dose training isn’t just for beginners; experienced athletes can also benefit. Androulakis-Korakakis has compared various minimum effective dose approaches in competitive powerlifters, for example, and found that a few heavy sets of one to five reps per week, per exercise, could be enough to meaningfully increase strength. The subjects also reported feeling less sore after doing the shorter workouts.

“You’re not doing the same movement over and over again for multiple sets,” he said.

Super Short Cardio Workouts

Federal exercise guidelines recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise (like brisk walking) per week or 75 minutes if that exercise is more vigorous (think running). But emerging evidence suggests you can get similar benefits in even less time, said Duck-chul Lee, director of the Physical Activity Research Center at the University of Pittsburgh.

He and his colleagues have found that even five- to 10-minute bursts of an exercise with an intensity like running, and as little as 30 minutes total per week, significantly reduced the risk of all-cause mortality as well as deaths by heart attack or stroke.

Other small studies show similar effects. One such paper, published in 2016, found that previously sedentary men who did three hard 10-minute workouts per week improved their insulin resistance and other health markers just as much after three months as a group who did three moderate 45-minute workouts per week.

A small 2020 German study looked at obese participants in sedentary jobs who started a workout of five one-minute bursts of hard effort (80% to 95% of their maximum heart rate). Participants shrank their waist circumference, lowered their blood pressure and also improved their cardiovascular fitness in three months while a control group stayed the same.

If you’re new to exercise or aren’t interested in the gym, you can also boost your fitness by increasing the intensity of activities that are already part of your daily life. Experts call this VILPA: vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity. For instance, you might walk a bit faster to run an errand or climb a flight of stairs fast enough to get your heart rate up, said Thijs M.H. Eijsvogels, an exercise researcher at Radboud University Medical Center in the Netherlands.

If you’re starting from a sedentary lifestyle, every bit of exercise has a payoff, Lee said. He has worked on physical activity guidelines in Japan, where people are encouraged to try “plus 10” — simply adding 10 minutes of physical activity per day. If you aren’t ready to tackle higher intensity exercise, just adding a few extra minutes can improve your fitness.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.