The pressure to have a good workout can be intense thanks to fitness trackers and influencers on social media. As a result, many people define a good workout as exercise with lots of sweat and a super-high heart rate not a more moderate fitness regimen like walking or yoga. But thats wrong.

Studies show that walking just 21 minutes a day can lower your risk of heart disease by 30%, while exercise like yoga can reduce chronic back pain and have huge benefits for your mental health .

In other words, that HIIT workout or mildly painful run may not actually be right for you or even necessary, at least not for every workout. Experts shared what to know about low-intensity exercise and why its just as effective as high-intensity activity.

Hitting your maximum heart rate during every single workout is not necessary.

When it comes to your heart rate, which most fitness trackers measure, there is no need to hit your max heart rate in a workout, said Andrew Jagim , the director of sports medicine research at Mayo Clinic Health System in Onalaska, Wisconsin.

To calculate your maximum healthy heart rate, you can subtract your age from 220, Jagim said. So if youre 45 years old, you would subtract 45 from 220 to get a maximum heart rate of 175 beats per minute.

Most peoples heart rates (including athletes) stay between 60% and 80% of their max during cardio exercise and thats perfectly OK, Jagim said. He added that people who are working out at their maximum heart rate or just below it (between 80% and 100%) should not task themselves with a long, grueling workout. Instead, training at this intensity should last for 15 to 20 minutes and should involve interval training.

Jagim said this could look like 30 seconds of max effort followed by one to two minutes of light recovery, with your heart rate at 50% to 60% of your max for 15 to 20 minutes after.

You dont need to do an hour-long super-intense workout in this case: A shorter duration of time is actually recommended.

There are clear benefits to slower-paced workouts.

While many high-intensity workouts depend on timed interval training like the 30 seconds on, one-minute off method mentioned above that is generally not the case with lower-intensity workouts, said RaGina McKissick , a certified personal trainer and group fitness instructor at Lumos Yoga & Barre in Philadelphia.

Lower-intensity workouts include walking, barre, pilates and certain dance classes, McKissick said. These activities can be done at your own pace to ensure you reap all of the benefits of the exercise.

You can take as long as you want, which means you can focus on the other things that are so important, like maximizing the movement, full range of movement, mobility, flexibility, depth and strength, she said.

Another benefit of low-intensity workouts is the ability to focus on and control your breathing, McKissick said. A lot of times in high-intensity workouts, people dont know how to breathe correctly and so they either fatigue really fast or they get light-headed or nauseous, she added.

In slower-paced, low-intensity workouts, you can laser-focus on your breath and even use that breathwork to help you get through certain movements, she said.