Doing one to two minutes of vigorous exercise multiple times a day — such as climbing stairs or running the bus — can reduce the risk of premature death, a new study suggests.
For those who hate the gym, there’s some good news: Australian researchers report Thursday in the journal Naturopathic Medicine that the new study found that just three or four one-minute snorts and inhalations throughout the day Qi can reduce the risk of premature death by as much as 40%.
Emmanuel Stamatakis, lead author of the study, said: “Especially for people who do not regularly engage in vigorous exercise in their free time, short but moderate Regular vigorous exercise is just as beneficial as recreational exercise.”, Professor of Physical Activity, Lifestyle and Population Health, Charles Perkins Centre, University of Sydney.
That doesn’t mean gym-goers should give up exercising, Stamatakis
said in an email.
“Every physical activity counts, no matter how short the time,” he added. “The higher the intensity and the more regular the bursts, the better. People who already have a regular routine of vigorous recreational exercise should stick with it and use VILPA (Lifestyle Vigorous Interval Physical Activity) as an adjunct to, not a replacement for, their regular routine.” Taste.”
Many types of activities qualify for VILPA, Stamatakis said, including climbing stairs, brisk walking uphill, carrying shopping bags, playing with children or pets, and intensive gardening or housework. “As long as the heart rate goes up for a minute or two, it’s probably strenuous exercise,” he adds.
The study itself doesn’t explain how these brief bursts of activity help people live longer.
“However, it is plausible to speculate that VILPA, when repeated regularly, leads to improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness over time, Stamatakis said. “Cardiorespiratory fitness is an important causal determinant of cardiovascular disease — that is, people with low fitness are more likely to experience cardiovascular disease.”
Earlier research showed that intermittent bouts of vigorous exercise can improve aerobic fitness even in previously inactive people, Stamatakis said.
To take a closer look at how VILPA impacts longevity, Stamatakis and his colleagues turned to data from participants in the UK Biobank, a large-scale biomedical database. The researchers focused on 25,241 participants, average age 62, who agreed to wear an activity tracker on their wrists and reported that they did not do sports or exercise during leisure time.
When the researchers analyzed the participants’ activity data, they found that across 6.9 years of follow-up, participants who engaged in one or two minutes of VILPA three times a day had a 38% to 40% reduction in their risk of dying from any cause and a 48% to 49% reduction in their risk of dying from cardiovascular disease.
The new study’s findings “are very encouraging,” said Dr. I-Min Lee, a professor of medicine at the Harvard Medical School and an epidemiologist and physical activity researcher at the Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston. “Just living your regular life but doing a little more at your ‘inconvenience,’ such as walking up stairs rather than waiting for the elevator can be helpful. You can think of these bursts of activity as little exercise snacks.”
How do you know if what you’re doing is vigorous enough?
“Walking up stairs at a regular rate is already intense,” Lee said. “Basically you’re doing the activity at a high enough level that you cannot sing and cannot easily carry on a conversation. It’s not a really high level, just enough that you can’t talk easily.”
For those who are inactive, “this would be a good place to start,” said Dr. Johanna Contreras, director of the Mount Sinai Heart Failure Network and an associate professor of medicine at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. “You can incorporate a little bit of vigorous activity into your daily life and then go on from there.”
“While it’s important to keep yourself active, it doesn’t have to be 45 minutes a day,” Contreras said. “If you don’t have time to go the gym, you can be active in other ways. I take the stairs up and down in the hospital. I walk to the train. And sometimes I get off at an earlier stop. It’s important to mix activity in with your life.”
This article was originally published on TODAY.com
Hurry to the bus stop. Rush up the stairs. Play tag with your kids. Romp with the dog. Vacuum the living room with a little extra zing. Increasing the vigor and gusto of our daily activities could have a substantial impact on our longevity, according to a fascinating new study of movement intensity and mortality.
The study finds that as few as three minutes a day of vigorous everyday activity is linked to a 40 percent lower risk of premature death in adults, even when they do not otherwise exercise at all.
“It is fantastic” research, said Ulrik Wisloff, the director of the K.G. Jebsen Center for Exercise in Medicine at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. He has extensively studied activity and longevity but was not involved in the new study.
The study’s results join mounting scientific evidence that adding a little intensity to our lives pays big dividends for our health, without requiring extra equipment, instruction, gym memberships or time.
The idea that how we move influences how long we live is hardly new. Plenty of research links regular exercise with longer life spans, including the formal public health exercise guidelines, which recommend at least 150 minutes a week of moderate exercise for health and longevity.
More-focused research, though, suggests intensifying some of our exercise — making sure our heart rates and breathing rise — amplifies the health benefits. In a large-scale 2006 study from Wisloff’s lab, for instance, just 30 minutes a week of intense exercise dropped the risk of dying from heart disease by about half in men and women, compared to people who were sedentary. Similarly, a study published last year in JAMA Internal Medicine concluded that people who occasionally pushed themselves during exercise were about 17 percent less likely to die prematurely than other people who did the same amount of exercise, but at a gentler, moderate pace.
Both of these studies, though, and similar, past research were based on people’s subjective recall of how much and how hard they exercised. They also were exercise studies, making them inherently of interest mostly to people who exercise or would like to, which does not represent the greater part of humanity.