Running to the bus, romping around with a child or climbing stairs: According to a new study, such short but intensive phases of physical activity in everyday life can prolong our lives. According to this, even three to four one-minute phases of activity are associated with a reduced risk of up to 40 percent of dying from cancer or other diseases. For cardiovascular disease-related deaths, the risk reduction is as much as 49 percent. From the researchers' point of view, this is good news for everyone who doesn't have time for sport in their free time.
Sport is good for your health. It gets the cardiovascular system going, strengthens the immune system, and may even reduce the risk of certain types of cancer. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous physical activity or 150 to 300 minutes of moderate physical activity per week. Yet many adults spend most of their day sedentary and don't have the time or motivation to exercise in their free time.
Daily movement measured
"Despite the great health potential, most adults over the age of 40 do not exercise," writes a team led by Emmanuel Stamatakis from the University of Sydney in Australia. But is it really only long-lasting, conscious sports units that are beneficial to our health? "Our previous knowledge of the health benefits of vigorous physical activity comes from questionnaire-based studies, but questionnaires cannot measure short bouts of physical activity of any intensity," explains Stamatakis.
To understand the role of small, everyday bouts of activity that may not be consciously noticed, Stamatakis and his team used data from the UK Biobank, a large biomedical database containing health data from more than half a million people. For a week between 2013 and 2015, over 100,000 participants in the UK Biobank wore a small device on their wrist that recorded their movements and thus recorded physical activity - not only major sports sessions, but also so-called "vigorous, intermittent physical activity in everyday life". "vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity", VILPA for short). These are brief bouts of strenuous physical activity, usually lasting less than a minute or two.
Reduced risk of death
"The ability of wearable technology to uncover micro-patterns of physical activity like VILPA holds tremendous potential for understanding perhaps the most viable and time-saving ways people can benefit from physical activity, whether it's recreational or everyday." , says Stamatakis. In the analysis, the researchers only included people who said they did not exercise or go for more than one walk per week. Overall, the researchers analyzed data from 25,241 people, of whom 852 died of various causes two to seven years after the measurement. From this data, Stamatakis and his team calculated the risk of death depending on physical movements in everyday life. In addition to total mortality, they also looked at the risk of dying from cancer or cardiovascular disease.
The result: the more small phases of activity the subjects had in their everyday life, the lower their risk of dying during the seven-year follow-up period. "Compared to participants who had no phases of everyday activity, people with a mean VILPA frequency of three approximately one-minute phases of physical activity per day had a 38 to 40 percent reduced risk of dying from cancer or other causes, and a reduced risk of dying from cancer or other causes 48 to 49 percent reduced risk of cardiovascular death,” the researchers report. Even when they excluded people with poor health status and included body mass index, the values remained similar.
Even a little goes a long way
Stamatakis and his team compared these results to data on how vigorous physical activity reduces the risk of death in athletes. "Our study shows that similar benefits to high-intensity interval training (HIIT) can be achieved by increasing the intensity of casual activities of daily living—the more, the better," Stamatakis said. "A few very short exercises totaling three to four minutes a day can go a long way, and there are many daily activities that you can design to get your heart rate up for a minute or so."
While that doesn't mean that anyone who climbs a few flights of stairs three times a day will achieve the same level of health as a competitive athlete. However, compared to no movement at all, even a small contribution can make a big difference. From the point of view of the researchers, the main advantage is that VILPAs can be easily integrated into everyday life by everyone. Of the subjects studied, Stamatakis and his team recorded several of these activity spurts a day in 89 percent – an average of eight a day.
Relevant for public recommendations
Stamatakis advocates taking these results into account when developing future guidelines. "People who report that they do not exercise in their free time may not be aware that they also engage in short but intense health-promoting activities in their everyday lives." move more every day. “Increasing the intensity of daily activities requires no time commitment, no preparation, no club membership, and no special skills. It's just a matter of picking up the pace of walking or doing chores with a little more energy," says Stamatakis.
Source: Emmanuel Stamatakis (University of Sydney, Australia) et al., Nature Medicine, doi: 10.1038/s41591-022-02100-x