Modern Metabolic Health with Dr. Lindsay Ogle, MD

A Doctor’s Guide To Starting Exercise In 2026

• Lindsay Ogle, MD

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My recommendations for at home resistance training programs are:
-- Peloton ($12.99 option): https://www.onepeloton.com/app-membership
-- GLP Strong: https://www.glpstrong.com/
-- The FIT Collective: https://www.thefitcollective.com/musclesandmindset

Resolutions promise big change, but the body keeps the score on what we can actually sustain. We’re taking a fresh, evidence-based look at exercise as a lifelong tool for health, not a crash strategy for the scale. As a board-certified family and obesity medicine physician, I lay out a practical plan for starting or upgrading your movement routine in 2026—one that protects your heart and brain, builds strength and bone, and preserves independence without burning you out.

We unpack why exercise alone rarely drives major weight loss unless you’re training for hours a day, and why it still matters profoundly for metabolic health, mood, and longevity. You’ll get a clear safety checklist to follow before you begin, plus a simple progression: pick one enjoyable activity you can do this week, lock in consistency, and then either add minutes or add a day. We target the widely recommended 150 minutes per week, with an eye toward 300 minutes for even greater benefits, and we show how short sessions stack to reach those totals without hijacking your schedule.

From brisk walking, cycling, or dancing for cardio to bodyweight moves, bands, and light dumbbells for strength, we cover the mix that preserves muscle, boosts bone density, and improves insulin sensitivity. We also highlight balance and flexibility work—think yoga or Pilates—to reduce falls and keep daily movements smooth. If time is your biggest barrier, you’ll hear practical home options and trusted programs like the Peloton app, Fit Collective, and GLP Strong that offer short, scalable classes designed for real life. The result is a plan that prioritizes safety, enjoyment, and steady progress so you can maintain weight, feel better, and stay active for decades.

If this conversation helps you rethink movement, share it with someone who needs a nudge, then hit follow and leave a quick review. Your support helps more people find realistic, science-based guidance for metabolic health.

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Dr. Lindsay Ogle:

Welcome to the Modern Metabolic Health Podcast with your host, Dr. Lindsay Ogle, Board Certified Family Medicine and Obesity Medicine Physician. Here we learn how we can treat and prevent modern metabolic conditions such as diabetes, PCOS, fatty liver disease, metabolic syndrome, sleep apnea, and more. We focus on optimizing lifestyle while utilizing safe and effective medical treatments. Please remember that while I am a physician, I am not your physician. Everything discussed here is provided as general medical knowledge and not direct medical advice. Please talk to your doctor about what is best for you. If you have plans to start exercising in 2026, then you're gonna want to listen to this. My name is Dr. Lindsay Ogle and I'm a board-certified obesity medicine physician. An exercise is something that I discuss with my patients every single day. And today I want to talk to you about what my recommendations would be if you wanted to start or improve your exercise regimen in 2026. This time of year, many people make their New Year's resolutions, and exercise is a very common resolution to make, and I want you to be successful this year with increasing your physical activity for the purpose of improving your health and well-being. Let's start with why is exercise so important. We all intuitively know that we should be exercising, and many of us think that we should exercise to lose weight. We hear you know eat less and move more, and so we think if we you know tip the scales towards more exercise, then we'll be able to lose weight. But that saying is extremely outdated, and it is almost impossible to exercise enough to lose weight. Really, the only way to do it is if you are exercising for your job, you have a very physically demanding job. If you were one of the contestants on the biggest loser and exercising for hours a day, if you're a personal trainer or in the military, you know, if you are an athlete, you have to be exercising literally for hours a day to lose weight with exercise alone. So when I'm recommending exercise for my patients, I'm not thinking about it as a weight loss tool. I'm thinking about it as a tool to help improve health and longevity. Exercise can help improve cardiovascular health, decrease risk of heart disease and stroke. It can help improve body composition, it can help build our muscles and help make our bones stronger. It can help us with daily function, especially as we get older. It will allow us to continue to live independently for longer periods of time. We can then continue to carry our groceries in and put them away. We can lift our grandkids one day. It will help us to live longer and live better lives. There is also evidence that people who exercise on a regular basis just live longer. They have lower risks of falls and they have better metabolic health. And there's a lot of evidence for brain health too and decreased risk of dementia. Many people, when utilizing exercise in a safe and effective way, it also improves mental health. So as long as you are not using exercise as a tool to punish yourself, if you are using exercise as a way to get your body moving and improve your health and doing it in a way that is sustainable and enjoyable, you will see mental health improvements as well. And then while I made it very evident that exercise does not lead to weight loss, it does help with weight maintenance. It is extremely important for weight maintenance. People who lose weight and keep it off are typically exercising for an average of an hour a day. And that sounds like a lot. It sounds extremely overwhelming and out of reach for a lot of people, but I'm gonna go through how you may be able to get there over time. And I do want to highlight that much of that time was spent walking. So this does not have to be an intense hour of exercise, it can be an enjoyable walk outside. So if you were my patient and I was talking to you about starting an exercise regimen in 2026, this is the framework that I would go by and discuss with you. First, I would consider is it safe for you to start exercising? When you are moving your body, do you get chest pain? Are you very short of breath? Do you have any joint pain? Are you feeling lightheaded or dizzy? If the answer is yes to any of those questions, then I do not want you to exercise and I want you to schedule an appointment with your primary care doctor for an evaluation to make sure that there is not a more serious underlying problem like heart disease or asthma or something going on with your joints. These should be addressed first. They are way more urgent than the exercise plans that we are going to create. So safety first, as always, if you are experiencing chest pain, shortness of breath, joint pain, lightheadedness or dizziness, talk to your doctor before exercising. Next, I would want you to choose something that is attainable and enjoyable. So this may look like walking outside for five or ten minutes, one or two days a week. It may also be stretching for five or ten minutes, two or three days a week. It could be taking one yoga class a week. It could be taking a Zumba or a dance class. It could be finding a YouTube video and exercising along with that one day a week. I do not expect anybody to go from being sedentary to exercising five days a week. I just don't see it happening in real life. So let's do something that we know that you can achieve and then we will build up on top of that. And again, exercise is not supposed to be a punishment, and there is not one best exercise that everybody should be doing. So choose what you enjoy doing and what fits in your lifestyle right now, not what you did back in junior high or high school. You're a different person now, and that's okay. And choose something that fits you now. Once you're in that consistent routine of whatever you decided to start with, you can then increase the duration and do it for those amount of days, just longer periods of time, or you can increase the frequency and add a day in the week when you're doing your exercise. Choose one or the other until you get comfortable with that and continue to repeat slowly over time. And how much exercise are we shooting for? It's recommended for all adults to have at least 150 minutes of physical activity or exercise per week. And that can be split up over a different number of days depending on your schedule. It's best not to do it all in one day, but if you have one day where you're doing half of that, then that is okay if that fits your schedule right now. But it's best to split it up throughout the week and you can absolutely include a day or two of rest throughout the week. But 150 minutes per week is the minimum, with the ideal goal to be 300 minutes. But again, you can start with 10 or 20 minutes a week and then increase over time. We are looking at big picture your whole life and we have a lot of time to build these habits in. We want to do it in a sustainable manner because there is no benefit from doing 300 minutes a week for two weeks and then never exercising the rest of the year. You'll be in a much better spot if you start at 10 minutes a week in January, and then by December, you will be shocked at how consistent you are with your exercise plan. And then the exercises that you choose should have a little bit of variety to them. So I mentioned most people who are maintaining their weight are walking. So you do some sort of cardio, whether that's walking, jogging, swimming, the elliptical, biking, anything that you enjoy, again, that will count as cardiovascular activity, it's a great baseline. And then you also want to choose activities that are strength training, so that can be low-impact options like yoga or Pilates or body weight exercises, and then you can build up to using resistance bands or light dumbbells or you know weight machines. And if this is all intimidating, do not hesitate asking for a referral to a physical therapist, and in some areas you don't need a referral, and they can make sure that you are safe and steady to start your exercise. And then you can also work with a personal trainer and you can get that direct guidance and feedback to get make sure that you are doing this in a safe way because we do not want you to get injured, and then we will have to start back basically at square one with exercise. So um take it easy, start at the beginner classes and then work your way up. It would also be wonderful to have a day or two of an exercise that improves flexibility and balance. Yoga and Pilates are great options for this. Um, balance and flexibility are so important as we age to again help prevent falls and maintain our independence as we get older. The biggest barrier I hear for my patients when they are wanting to start exercise is time. They don't have enough time in their busy schedules, and I know it's extremely difficult when you have a job and children or school and all of your social activities and sleep needs to be prioritized and you're working on your nutrition. There's a lot going on, but investing your time in your health is going to pay out big dividends down the line and is very important. But again, you can start with those small investments of time and work your way up. You also do not need to go to a gym to do this exercise. There are a lot of great home exercise programs. There are three that I often recommend to my patients. One is the Peloton app. This is great because there are so many exercise classes to choose from. Many people automatically think of the Peloton bike, but this is something different. They have stretching, walking, running, yoga, Pilates, body weight, um, lightweig, like heavier weights. Um, there's lots of different meditation. There are so many classes that you can join live, although your video is not on, um, but you can join live to get that energy, or you can watch replays. The instructors are so positive. This is something that I joined back in the beginning of 2025 and have used throughout the year and really enjoy it. One of the things I really like about this app is you can choose the amount of time that you have. So you can choose something that is as short as five minutes to longer than an hour. I typically do something between 10 and 30 minutes, and I feel like I'm getting a great workout in a short period of time. There's two more programs that I recommend. They are developed by obesity medicine physicians whom I admire and have been kind of mentors to me. One is the Fit Collective and the other is GLP Strong. All of those links will be included below. The two that were created by obesity medicine physicians were created for just this. They were created for people who are on a health and weight loss journey, who may or may not be on a GLP1 medication and want to maintain or build their muscle mass, and they take just 20 minutes two times a week or 10 minutes three times a week to complete. So the time investment is low. The monetary investment is also fairly low for all of these options, so they are extremely attainable, and I highly recommend any three of them. Choose one that you might want to join for the year and go through these steps. Is it safe for you to exercise? Are you enjoying it? How can we start as something that's attainable and then work our way up to the minimum of 150 minutes to an ultimate goal of 300 minutes per week? I also provide a lot more information more frequently on social media on Instagram and TikTok, so you can follow me over there if you don't already, and I look forward to seeing you later. Thank you for listening and learning how you can improve your metabolic health in this modern world. If you found this information helpful, please share with a friend, family member, or colleague. We need to do all we can to combat the dangerous misinformation that is out there. Please subscribe and write a review. This will help others find the podcast so they may also improve their metabolic health. I look forward to our conversation next week.