Movement · topic 1 of 7

Weekly volume

How much per week, and why the third flag sits well above 150 minutes

In the app

The Activity page draws your week as a climb, with flags at 150, 300 and 610 minutes. The line is your aerobic minutes; the flags are where the evidence below changes what it says.

Video walkthrough — Weekly Activity Volume

In production, coming soon

The Weekly Ascent draws no lines to clear and has no ceiling. The climb rises as far as your week does, and a flag is planted where it passes 150, 300 and 610 measured minutes — only once passed, so there is never a mark ahead of you to fall short of. Someone who runs thirty miles every weekend and logs 1,200 minutes sees a climb to 1,200. The first two figures are the familiar public-health doses. The third is newer, larger, and measured the same way Verve measures you.

The climb is drawn as two bands. The line is the week’s measured moderate-plus-vigorous minutes, exactly as before. Beneath it, the area is split: moderate minutes fill from the ground up, and vigorous minutes sit on top of them, in a darker green. Nothing is re-weighted — vigorous is not credited double the way WHO’s moderate-equivalent doses are, because the axis carries measured minutes and one axis holds one unit. What the bands add is composition: intensity drives most of the fitness benefit, and a 75-minute week that was all hard running now looks like what it is rather than like half a target.

Liang et al — BJSM 2026, device-measured activity and CVD

17,088 UK Biobank participants wearing accelerometers, mean age 57, followed for incident cardiovascular disease, with Mendelian randomisation used to test causal consistency. Meeting the familiar 150 min/week gave only an 8–9% risk reduction; reaching 560–610 min/week was associated with over 30% lower risk of myocardial infarction, stroke, heart failure and atrial fibrillation. People with lower cardiorespiratory fitness needed 30–50 min/week more than fitter people for the same benefit. Verve's third flag is planted at 610, the upper bound of that range: the dose-response curve flattens around there, which is why no flag sits above it. The climb itself has no top. Worth noting the cohort was 96% white and middle-aged, so the exact numbers may not transfer to every population.

doi.org →

Why Verve counts minutes as measured

Commentary

Public-health targets credit vigorous activity double — 150 moderate-equivalent minutes can be met with 75 vigorous ones. Those figures come from questionnaires. Verve counts what your device actually recorded, without doubling, which is the same way the study above measured activity. It is the more conservative reading: a vigorous week counts for less here than a guideline would allow, never more.

doi.org →