Too Tired to Exercise? What Movement to Do When Energy Is Low
- The UK Chief Medical Officers and the US Physical Activity Guidelines both recommend at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, and both state that any activity is better than none.
- The US guidelines dropped the old rule that activity had to come in blocks of at least ten minutes, so two minutes on the stairs counts.
- In a University of Georgia trial of 36 sedentary adults with persistent fatigue, six weeks of low-intensity aerobic exercise cut fatigue by 65%, compared with 49% in the moderate-intensity group.
- The NHS advises seeing a GP if you have felt tired for a few weeks without knowing why, or if tiredness affects your daily life.
- NICE guidance says people with ME/CFS should not be offered programmes based on fixed incremental increases in exercise, and the NHS long Covid service says not to push through fatigue.
It is 6.40pm. You have been awake since six, the gym kit is still in the bag by the door, and the plan you made on Sunday says "45 minutes, legs". The honest choice at this point is usually between a smaller session and no session, and most exercise advice pretends the first option does not exist.
This guide is about that smaller session: whether it counts, what the research says about exercising when tired, what to do at three different energy levels, and the cases where tiredness is a medical question and movement is the wrong answer.
Does a short, easy session count as exercise?
Yes, and the official guidance in both countries now says so directly. The UK Chief Medical Officers' guidelines ask adults for at least 150 minutes of moderate activity a week, or 75 minutes of vigorous activity, plus strength work on at least 2 days.
The same document adds two lines that matter on a tired day: "any activity is better than none, and more is better still", and "every minute counts".
The US Physical Activity Guidelines set the same 150 to 300 minutes and state that any amount of physical activity has some health benefits. The first edition said activity only counted in bouts of ten minutes or more.
The second edition removed that requirement, to encourage people to move more often through the day. It also lists benefits that arrive straight away: physical activity can reduce anxiety and blood pressure and improve quality of sleep.
The NHS puts a number on the smallest useful unit. A brisk ten-minute daily walk counts towards your 150 minutes. Brisk means about 3 miles an hour: you can still talk, but you could not sing.
Does moving when you are tired help or make it worse?
For ordinary tiredness in otherwise healthy people, the evidence points towards helping, with the surprise that easier exercise may do more than harder exercise.
The best-known study is a University of Georgia trial published in Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics in 2008. Researchers took 36 volunteers who did not exercise regularly and reported persistent fatigue, and split them into three groups.
One did 20 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise three times a week for six weeks, at 75% of their peak oxygen consumption. One did the same schedule at low intensity, 40% of peak, which is a leisurely effort. The third did no exercise.
Both exercise groups reported energy levels 20% higher than the control group. Fatigue fell by 49% in the moderate group and by 65% in the low-intensity group. In plain terms, the people who barely broke a sweat felt less tired than the people who worked harder.
Some caution is due. Thirty-six people is a small trial, the participants were young adults, and nobody in it had a medical cause for their fatigue. It says nothing about tiredness with a medical cause.
It does suggest that if you are run-down and inactive, an hour a week of very easy movement is a fair experiment, and that going harder is not required for it to work.
Who should not push through tiredness?
ME/CFS and long Covid are different
If you have myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), or long Covid with symptoms that get worse after activity, the advice in the rest of this article does not apply to you.
The defining feature is post-exertional malaise, which the CDC describes as a worsening of symptoms after even minor physical or mental exertion that would previously have been tolerated. The CDC states that standard exercise recommendations for healthy people can substantially harm patients with ME/CFS.
In the UK, NICE guideline NG206 says that any programme using fixed incremental increases in physical activity or exercise, for example graded exercise therapy, should not be offered to people with ME/CFS.
The NHS Your COVID Recovery service notes that symptoms can worsen 12 to 72 hours after activity, and its instruction is plain: do not try to push through your fatigue.
The CDC and the NHS service both recommend pacing, which means balancing rest and activity to stay within your limits, with support from a clinician who knows the condition. If a walk on Monday regularly flattens you on Wednesday, raise that pattern with your GP or doctor before trying any plan, including this one.
The same caution applies during and just after an infection, after surgery, in pregnancy with complications, and with any heart or lung condition. In those situations your own clinician's advice on activity outranks a general article.
What should you do at each energy level?
Decide your options in advance, while you are not tired, because a tired brain picks the sofa. Then on the day, rate your energy honestly and do the matching row. The table below is a starting menu. The minutes are deliberately small.
| Energy today | What to do | Minutes | Stop if |
|---|---|---|---|
| Nothing in the tank | Stand up and walk round the house or to the end of the street and back. Or five slow stretches for calves, hips, chest, neck and shoulders. Outdoors and daylight if possible | 3 to 5 | You feel dizzy or unwell. Rest is a legitimate choice today |
| A bit | An easy ten-minute walk at talking pace. Or one round of 8 sit-to-stands from a chair, 8 wall press-ups and a 20-second supported balance on each leg | 10 | You feel worse at the five-minute mark than when you started |
| Okay, not great | A brisk 20-minute walk (you can talk, you cannot sing), an easy cycle or swim, or two rounds of the strength circuit above with a backpack or light weights | 15 to 25 | Form goes or you start clock-watching. Finish there |
Two rules make this work. First, the timer is a ceiling as well as a floor: when ten minutes is up you are allowed to stop, and knowing that makes it far easier to start.
Second, use the five-minute check. Most people feel slightly better five minutes into easy movement. If you feel worse, that is information, and you go home.
Before blaming your willpower, check the boring causes. If lunch was a biscuit at your desk and you have had one glass of water since breakfast, eat and drink something and reassess in twenty minutes.
If the real problem is that you slept five hours, tonight's bedtime will do more for tomorrow's workout than anything you do in the gym today. Our guide to screens and better sleep covers the evening end of that.
Do "exercise snacks" work?
The phrase covers very short bursts of effort scattered through a normal day: taking stairs quickly, walking fast for the bus, carrying heavy shopping.
The strongest data comes from a 2022 study in Nature Medicine led by Emmanuel Stamatakis, which used wrist-worn trackers on 25,241 UK Biobank participants who said they did no leisure-time exercise, average age about 62, and followed them for an average of 6.9 years.
The researchers counted bursts of vigorous everyday activity lasting one or two minutes. The typical participant managed three a day, totalling about 4.4 minutes.
Compared with people who recorded none, that level was associated with a 26 to 30% lower risk of death from any cause or from cancer, and a 32 to 34% lower risk of death from cardiovascular disease.
This was an observational study, so it cannot prove the stair-climbing caused the difference. People who can bound up stairs at 62 may simply be healthier to begin with, and the authors adjusted for that as far as the data allowed.
Still, it fits the direction of the official guidance: minutes you would never log as a workout appear to be worth having. On a tired day, two brisk flights of stairs is a reasonable thing to call done.
What does a low-energy week add up to?
More than it feels like. Here is a week built only from the two lower rows of the table, for someone who is properly worn out, with the arithmetic done.
| Day | What happened | Minutes |
|---|---|---|
| Monday | Ten-minute walk at lunch | 10 |
| Tuesday | Stretches while the kettle boiled, stairs at work twice | 5 |
| Wednesday | Ten-minute walk, plus one round of the chair and wall circuit | 15 |
| Thursday | Nothing. Bed at 9.30pm | 0 |
| Friday | Ten-minute walk after dinner | 10 |
| Saturday | Twenty-minute brisk walk to the shops and back with bags | 20 |
| Sunday | Second strength round, five minutes of stretching | 10 |
| Total | Five days with some walking, strength work on 2 days, one full rest day | 70 |
Seventy minutes is under half the 150-minute guideline, and it still includes the two strength days the UK guidance asks for. It is also 70 minutes more than the week where the 45-minute plan was abandoned on Monday.
The Georgia trial used 60 minutes a week. If energy improves, add five minutes to two of the walks each week until you reach 150, and leave the rest day where it is.
When is tiredness a reason to see a doctor?
Tiredness that needs checking
The NHS says to see a GP if you have been feeling tired for a few weeks and are not sure why, if your tiredness affects your daily life, or if you feel tired and have other symptoms such as weight loss or mood changes, or you have been told you make gasping, snorting or choking noises in your sleep.
In the US, see your doctor or primary care provider for the same reasons. Chest pain, severe breathlessness, fainting or a racing, irregular heartbeat during or after activity are emergencies: call 999 in the UK or 911 in the US.
Low mood most days for more than two weeks is also a reason to speak to a GP or doctor. It is not something to walk off.
The NHS lists the common causes of tiredness as too little sleep, an unhealthy diet and lack of activity, stress, depression, life events such as bereavement or a new baby, hormonal changes in pregnancy and menopause, infections including Covid-19, and some medicines and treatments.
Several of those will not respond to a walking plan, which is why a few weeks of unexplained tiredness deserves a blood test and a conversation before it gets a new pair of trainers.
Questions readers ask
Is it better to rest or exercise when you are tired?
It depends on the kind of tired. After a short night or a draining day, ten easy minutes often leaves people feeling better, and you can stop at five if it does not.
If you are ill, recovering from an infection, or have a condition where symptoms worsen after exertion, rest is the right call. A full rest day each week belongs in any plan.
Is a ten-minute walk really worth doing?
The NHS says a brisk ten-minute daily walk has lots of health benefits and counts towards the weekly 150 minutes. The US guidelines removed their ten-minute minimum altogether because any amount of activity has some benefit. Seven ten-minute walks is 70 minutes a week, close to half the guideline, from something that needs no kit and no change of clothes.
Should I exercise after a bad night's sleep?
Keep it light. Coordination and concentration tend to suffer when you are short of sleep, so it is a poor day for heavy weights, fast cycling in traffic or anything technical. A daylight walk is a sensible swap. Then protect tonight's sleep, which will do more for the rest of your training week than one salvaged session.
What if I feel worse for days after exercise?
Ordinary muscle soreness peaks a day or two after unfamiliar exercise and fades. Feeling ill, exhausted or foggy for days after modest activity is different, and it is the pattern described in ME/CFS and in some people with long Covid. Stop increasing your activity and speak to your GP or doctor. Do not try to train through it.
Does low-energy movement help with weight?
This article makes no promises on weight. The reasons given here for moving on tired days are the ones the guidelines cite: sleep, mood, blood pressure, strength and long-term health. Those benefits apply at any size, and they do not depend on the number on a scale changing.
Sources
- Department of Health and Social Care. UK Chief Medical Officers' physical activity guidelines: adults and older adults (19 and over), infographic text.
- US Department of Health and Human Services. Top 10 things to know about the second edition of the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans.
- NHS. Walking for health; Tiredness and fatigue. Reviewed 2 June 2023.
- University of Georgia. Low-intensity exercise reduces fatigue symptoms by 65 percent, study finds. 2008. Reporting Puetz TW, Flowers SS, O'Connor PJ. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. 2008;77(3):167–174.
- Stamatakis E, Ahmadi MN, Gill JMR, et al. Association of wearable device-measured vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity with mortality. Nature Medicine. 2022;28:2521–2529.
- National Institute for Health and Care Excellence. Myalgic encephalomyelitis (or encephalopathy)/chronic fatigue syndrome: diagnosis and management (NG206), rationale and impact. 29 October 2021.
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. ME/CFS: strategies to prevent worsening of symptoms.
- NHS England, Your COVID Recovery. Long COVID: fatigue.
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