Just 1 minute of vigorous exercise a day could add years to your life

If you do not exercise to exercise, do five or six vigorous activities, each lasting about 10 seconds every day, can make a big difference. In the United States, a study revealed that people who were doing a total of just over a minute of vigorous activity every day were much less likely to die of a cause in the following six years than those who made it.

Only about 15% of adults regularly exercise, explains Emmanuel Stamatakis at the University of Sydney in Australia. “The majority of the adult population has trouble, or they are not lively, or they are unable to integrate regular exercises in their daily routine.”

The Stamatakis and his colleagues have therefore explored the health benefits of the accessory exercise that people get, such as putting on a steep hill, playing vigorously with children or wearing heavy loads. They did so by involving people who are already participating in major health studies to carry monitors for a week to assess their normal activity levels, then examining their risk of dying in the following years.

In 2023, the researchers reported results of tens of thousands of people participating in the British Biobanque study. They found that those who were about 4.4 minutes of vigorous activities per day were 38% less likely to die of any cause during the next seven or eight years than those who made them.

Now the team reported the results of 3,300 people participating in the Nhanes study in the United States, which were generally less fit than those of the Biobank study. “They are much more overweight and obese on average, and they do much less physical activity,” says Stamatakis.

In this group, only 1.1 minutes of vigorous activity per day was necessary to reduce the risk of dying of any cause in the next six years by 38%.

This means that 1.1 minutes in this less adjusted American group produced the same relative improvement as 4.4 minutes in the Fitter UK group, but that does not mean that they have reached the same level of health. Participants in the American study generally had a level of aptitude lower than Cess, so their overall risk of dying of any cause was even higher.

“The authors suggest, and I agree, that this can reflect a more inactive and higher risk population, which draws a greater advantage from small amounts of vigorous activity,” explains Carlos Celis-Moral at the University of Glasgow in the United Kingdom. “This is what we call a ceiling effect: in people with high fitness levels, there is less room for improvement, while in inactive individuals with probable physical form, the range of improvement is greater.”

The results also add to proof that small amounts of vigorous accessory exercise may have large advantages. But that has not yet been established, no doubt, warns Stamatakis. “Logically, it makes sense that it can have health benefits,” he said. “But with this type of study, you can never prove causality.”

His team now provides for other studies which can provide more solid evidence than the health benefits observed are really the result of the more incidental exercise. The long -term objective is to find ways to increase the amount of exercises that people get while doing daily activities. “We hope that one day, we can intervene to help people increase their accessory activity without having to go to gymnasiums,” explains Stamatakis.