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Journalism of Courage
Waking up and heading straight to the gym in the morning takes a lot of motivation. Perhaps, this explains the reluctance of many to hit the gym or engage in regular workouts. A new study shows that you may not need to exercise strenuously to live longer. The research suggests that doing five to six vigorous activities lasting about 10 seconds each every day could make a big difference.
The study by US researchers suggests that vigorous activities for just over one minute each day make you less likely to die in the next six years than those who did not do anything. According to a report in New Scientist, Emmanuel Stamatakis from the University of Sydney in Australia said that only about 15 per cent of adults exercise regularly. Stamatakis said that a majority of the adult population find it hard, or are not keen, or are plainly unable to add regular exercise to their daily routine.
The report said that Stamatakis and his colleagues have been examining the benefits of incidental exercise from regular activities like walking up a steep hill, actively playing with children, or even carrying heavy objects. The researchers studied this by gathering people already part of large health studies. These people were made to wear monitors for a week to study their normal activity levels.
The team said that results from 3300 people who took part in the NHANES study in the US found that just 1.1 minutes of vigorous activity a day was needed to lower the risk of death by any cause in the following six years by 38 per cent.
Back in 2023, the team had reported that out of thousands of people who took part in the UK Biobank study, those who did around 4.4 minutes of vigorous activities a day were 38 per cent less likely to die of any cause in the next seven to eight years than those who did none. It needs to be noted that the participants in the NHANES study were generally less fit than those in the Biobank study.
The results suggest that even small amounts of vigorous incidental exercise can have big benefits. However, Stamatakis cautioned that the results of such a study can never prove causation. The researcher and his team are planning to conduct more studies on this to gather substantial evidence.Reportedly, their larger goal is to find ways to increase the amount of exercise people get while doing everyday activities.
