A Few Minutes of Hard Exercise May Slash Your Risk for Diseases, Study Says
· Time
It will come as no surprise that science suggests you should be exercising. Especially when it comes to heart health, doctors and researchers have observed for decades that getting up and moving—whether it’s going for a run or a swim or even a brisk walk to the grocery store—is linked to better outcomes.
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However, the latest research suggests that this doesn’t need to mean spending hours each week panting at the gym. Studies drawing on data from people wearing activity monitors on their wrists suggest that even very small amounts of light exercise, such as walking, have a noticeable health benefit. What’s more, just a few minutes of vigorous exercise a week seems to improve more than just the heart and lungs.
A new study published March 30 in the European Heart Journal looked at links between vigorous exercise and the risk of developing eight different conditions or groups of conditions, including Type 2 diabetes, immune-mediated inflammatory disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, and atrial fibrillation. Although these types of studies can’t prove causation, the researchers found that vigorous exercise has a substantial link to a reduced risk of developing all these conditions—suggesting that a bit of sweating can do more good than you know.
Exercise might affect multiple risk factors
Previous research has found links between vigorous activity and a reduced risk of cardiovascular problems and mortality, says Emmanuel Stamatakis, a professor at Monash University in Australia and an author of the new paper. “This study goes further and covers a broader range of non-communicable diseases,” he continues, including dementia and metabolic conditions like liver disease and chronic kidney disease.
The team used data on nearly 100,000 people from the UK Biobank, which contains information on health outcomes and, for this subset of participants, information from activity trackers worn for a week. They also used information from questionnaires filled out by a larger number of participants about their physical activity.
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They found that people who had more than 4% of their physical activity classified as vigorous—meaning that they would have been breathless enough to have a hard time talking—had dramatically reduced risk of all the diseases examined. Their risks were from 29%-61% lower, depending on the disease, than people who never reached that level of exertion.
Each disease was a bit different. Lowered risk of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, a category that includes Crohn’s disease, was strongly linked to vigorous exercise. Type 2 diabetes risk, on the other hand, was linked to both the overall volume of time spent in all levels of exertion and the amount spent in vigorous exercise. “It's one of the conditions where you see that the volume matters,” says Stamatakis, rather than just the intensity.
How much exercise is enough?
In the U.S., current recommendations suggest getting 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity each week, or 150 minutes of moderate activity. But even very small amounts of high-intensity activity can have a surprisingly large health effect, this research group and others have found.
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As little as 4 to 5 minutes a day of vigorous activity are linked to substantial changes, says Stamatakis. “Four and a half minutes are associated with approximately 35 to 50% lower risk for incident cardiovascular disease,” he says.
How can you tell if exercise counts as “vigorous?”
“If you can speak comfortably, that means that you are still in the moderate zone,” says Stamatakis. “When you enter the vigorous zone, you will get out of breath.” Vigorous exercise is often fairly uncomfortable, and most people who don’t exercise often are unlikely to be able to sustain it for more than a minute or two at a time.
Don’t worry if that describes you, however. “60 seconds is absolutely fine,” Stamatakis says. “We have a lot of research now showing that accruing activity from such short bursts” is beneficial. Running to catch the bus counts, in other words, as does climbing the stairs, as long as you’re so out of breath you can’t speak.
Upping the amount of vigorous exercise you get might be easier than you think, and while the details of how it might affect organs as diverse as the kidneys and lungs are still a matter of active research, there is enough evidence suggesting positive effects that it’s worth getting up out of your comfort zone, a few minutes every day.