Why doing a mix of exercise could be the key to longer life

Don’t put all your eggs in one basket when it comes to exercise: doing a variety of different physical activities each week is key to improving your health and living longer, a study suggests.

After tracking the weekly exercise habits of 110,000 men and women in the United States for 30 years, researchers found that active people who engaged in the widest variety of exercises were 19 percent less likely to die during that time than those who focused on just one activity.

This effect was greater than for individual sports such as walking, tennis, rowing and jogging.

The total amount of exercise you do remains key, experts say, but doing a range of activities you enjoy can provide many benefits.

Maddie Albon, 29, a global marketing manager who lives in London, does triathlons in her spare time – but that’s just the start.

Her other sports include tennis, spin classes, yoga, Pilates and weight training.

“Each different exercise offers something different,” she says.

“You have to have variety to be good at a sport. To be good at running, you have to do strength training.”

As well as the physical health benefits, Maddie – who is from New Zealand – finds the combination of activities improves her mood.

“Sometimes I don’t have the energy for an intense session, so doing this yoga to relax, it really helps my mental wellbeing.”

“It’s nice to have these other options to move your body and really carve out that time in the day,” she told the BBC.

Maddie started triathlons last year and says she would now like to try some team sports, as they can be “a bit more social” than some of the exercises she currently does.

It is already known that being active benefits our physical and mental health and helps reduce the risk of developing a number of diseases affecting the heart, blood vessels and lungs. Exercise can also reduce the consequences of early death from certain cancers.

“It is important to maintain a high level of total physical activity, and in addition to that, diversifying the types of activities may be more beneficial,” said Dr. Yang Hu, of the Harvard School of Public Health, lead author of the study in the journal BMJ Medicine.

“Combine activities that have complementary health benefits [such as resistance training and aerobic exercise] can be very useful,” he added.

NHS advice says adults aged 19 to 64 should aim to:

• strengthening activities that work all major muscles at least two days per week
• 150 minutes of moderate-intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous activity per week
• spread it evenly over 4-5 days a week
• and don’t spend too much time sitting, lying down or still

Aerobic activities increase your heart rate and make you breathe faster. They include brisk walking, cycling, tennis, dancing, hiking, or mowing the lawn.

Vigorous exercise makes you breathe hard and fast. Examples are running, swimming, football, hockey, gymnastics or climbing stairs.

Exercises that strengthen muscles include yoga, lifting weights, tai chi, sit-ups, vigorous gardening and carrying heavy shopping bags.

For the study, more than 70,000 nurses aged 30 to 55 and 40,000 healthcare professionals aged 40 to 75 were asked to provide information on the activities they engaged in each week, such as walking, jogging, running, cycling, swimming, rowing, tennis and squash.

They completed questionnaires every two years and reported the amount of strength training exercises they did, as well as low-intensity exercises like yoga and other activities such as gardening and stair climbing.

After crunching the numbers, researchers found that most individual types of exercise reduced the risk of death from any cause. But people who participated in the widest range of activities fared even better.

Their risk of dying from cancer, heart disease, lung disease or other causes was 13 to 41 percent lower than other people.

Research also found that six hours of moderate activity or three hours of vigorous exercise was the optimal amount of exercise each week, after which the benefits stabilized.

Although the study was large and physical activity was measured multiple times, the research has limitations. The study cannot rule out that people’s health may have influenced the exercise they did, rather than the other way around, although it attempted to take into account a range of lifestyle factors.