When it comes to exercise, the best advice might be to work harder, not longer. Research published this past weekend highlights the unique benefits of a breathtaking workout.
Scientists tracked the long-term health of residents in the UK. People who spent more time performing vigorous physical activity during the week were significantly less likely to develop eight different chronic diseases and to die earlier, the researchers found, even when accounting for people’s total length of activity. They argue that regularly performing just short bursts of strenuous exercise, such as running after a bus, could have a big impact on people’s longevity.
“These findings support, whenever possible, prioritizing higher-intensity activities in clinical and public health interventions aimed at preventing non-communicable diseases,” they wrote in their paper, published Sunday in the European Heart Journal.
Why the type of exercise matters
Scientists already know that vigorous exercise, typically defined as any activity that leaves you out of breath while doing it, tends to provide more health benefits per minute than lighter exercise. But according to the researchers, there’s still some uncertainty about how these benefits stack up across different health conditions as well as the relative importance between how long and how intensively someone exercises.
To get to the bottom of this, the team examined data from the UK Biobank, a long-running project following the health of middle-aged residents in the country. A subset of Biobank volunteers were also asked to wear an accelerometer on their wrist for a week, allowing the researchers to objectively measure a baseline of people’s physical activity. All in all, they studied over 300,000 people who self-reported their typical physical activity in a week, along with nearly 100,000 who had their activity tracked.
Compared to people who reported or performed no vigorous activity, people who spent at least 4% or more of their weekly time doing something intense were less likely to develop these conditions over a seven-year follow-up period: major cardiovascular disease, liver disease, chronic kidney disease, chronic respiratory diseases, immune-related inflammatory diseases, an irregular heartbeat, type 2 diabetes, and dementia.
The largest relative benefits were seen for dementia (63% lower) and diabetes (60% lower), while more vigorous exercisers were also 46% less likely to die during the study period. And exercise intensity compared to exercise length seemed to be most correlated with a reduced risk of inflammatory disease, major cardiovascular disease, irregular heartbeat, and dementia. These findings indicate that vigorous exercise might especially help tamp down the harmful inflammation that contributes to these and other health problems.
Importantly, these patterns held up even when looking at people who performed roughly the same amount of physical activity in a week but at different intensity levels, and even when people only performed a small amount of vigorous exercise at all.
“Intensity consistently demonstrated a higher preventive potential than total [physical activity] volume,” the researchers wrote.
What should this mean for your daily routine?
The researchers acknowledge there are people who simply can’t turn up the level of their physical activity for any number of reasons, such as older age or pre-existing health conditions. And at the end of the day, any amount of regular exercise is still better than none.
But for those who are willing and able to make the most of their day, intensity might be the lifehack they’re looking for. And it doesn’t necessarily have to take a lot of time to do so, the researchers say.
“This doesn’t require going to the gym. Adding short bursts of activity that make you slightly breathless into daily life, like taking the stairs quickly, walking fast between errands or playing actively with children, can make a real difference,” said study author Minxue Shen, a public health professor at Central South University in Hunan, China, in a statement released by the European Society of Cardiology, the study’s publishers. “Even 15 to 20 minutes per week of this kind of effort—just a few minutes a day—was linked to meaningful health benefits.”
Personally speaking, this research will motivate me to push a bit harder during my jogs, at least some of the time.
