Least fit people need to do more exercise than fittest to get same benefit – study | Fitness
According to one study, the least fit people need to exercise 30 to 50 minutes more per week than the fittest to achieve the same reduction in cardiovascular risk.
Researchers examined data from more than 17,000 British adults participating in the UK Biobank study. They performed a cycle test to measure their baseline cardiorespiratory fitness (estimated VO2 max) and wore a fitness tracker for a week to record typical exercise levels.
The adults, aged 40 to 69, were followed for an average of eight years, during which more than 1,200 cardiovascular incidents occurred, including heart attacks, atrial fibrillation strokes and heart failure.
The NHS advises adults to do at least 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity each week, such as brisk walking, cycling or running.
The study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, found that meeting this guideline of two and a half hours of exercise was associated with an 8 to 9 percent reduction in cardiovascular risk.
“Given that a large portion of the population does not even meet this criterion, the main public health message remains simple: achieving 150 minutes per week of moderate to vigorous activity provides significant cardiovascular protection, regardless of fitness level,” the authors conclude.
The research also calculates that more exercise reduced the risk even further, but that the least fit people needed about 30 to 50 minutes of extra exercise per week to get the same benefits.
To reduce the risk by 20%, the least fit needed to do 370 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity per week, while those with the highest fitness levels only needed 340 minutes.
To reduce the risk of cardiovascular events by more than 30%, the least fit should do more than 10 hours (610 minutes), while the fittest should do just over nine hours (560 minutes).
“This finding highlights the larger challenge facing deconditioned populations,” the research concludes.
“Current guidelines for moderate-to-vigorous physical activity provide a universal but modest margin of safety, whereas optimal cardiovascular protection may require considerably higher volumes of activity.”
“Future guidelines and implementation strategies may need to differentiate between the minimum volume of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity required for a basic margin of safety and the considerably higher volumes needed for optimal cardiovascular risk reduction.”
These findings appear to contradict previous research, which found that walking just 4,000 steps a day would still reduce the risk of dying prematurely in older people by about a quarter.
But experts said recommending more than nine hours of exercise a week was “wrong”.
Aiden Doherty, professor of biomedical informatics at the University of Oxford, said: “We can’t put much weight on the figure of 560 to 610 minutes of exercise per week.
“It is clear that there will be a cardiovascular benefit for people who are able to do (more than) 1 hour 20 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity per day, but this is not a sensible public health message.
“The public should continue to aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity per week; more is better; every movement counts.”
Responding to the findings, a Sport England spokesperson said increasing activity levels was vital to keeping people healthy for longer: “Emerging research like this reinforces the importance of helping more people to be active, more often.
“Sport England’s own research shows that activity alleviates health problems for individuals and the NHS, preventing 1.3 million cases of depression, 600,000 of diabetes and 57,000 of dementia.”
