The Minimum Amount Of Exercise Needed
There’s good news for people who don’t have time to exercise for an hour or more every day. Thanks to fitness trackers, researchers find that doing a few “snack-size” amounts of activity for only a few minutes daily can improve your health and longevity.
One study involving fitness trackers found that a little over three minutes of vigorous activity could lower the risk of all major cardiac events, including heart attack and stroke, by around 45 percent in women living in the United Kingdom. The study targeted people who typically viewed themselves as non-exercisers.
Fitness trackers, also called movement trackers, monitor the wearer’s activity more accurately for researchers than asking people to remember the exercise they had just performed.
“Wrist-worn trackers are good for capturing mostly ‘ambulatory’ movement-based activities, like walking, but they’ll also capture vigorous gardening and quite a few other things,” Emmanuel Stamatakis, the study’s author and a Professor of Physical Activity at the University of Sydney in Australia, told the BBC’s Science Focus. “One of the reasons we’re able to see such large effects from such small amounts of physical activity is the accurate measurement.”
Before fitness trackers gained popularity, scientists could only obtain rough estimates of people’s activity through surveys.
“Typically, these ask for bouts of at least 10 minutes of walking, cycling, or gardening, so you’ve already cut off many of the [shorter] activities,” Lennart Veerman, Professor of Public Health at Griffith University School of Medicine in Queensland, Australia, told BBC’s Science Focus. “People can’t really recall what they were doing, and if you measure what they are doing imprecisely, then it’s more difficult to establish a relationship with an outcome.”
Stamatakis said he studies what he calls “vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity” (VILPA). He describes VILPA as short, intense bouts of activity, such as running upstairs, that are part of a person’s daily routine rather than an “exercise,” which implies a level of planning.
An earlier study using tracker data found that middle-aged and older inactive individuals who did one to three-minute VILPA sessions daily had about a 40 percent lower chance of dying within seven years compared to those who did not do any VILPAs.
VILPA is similar to micro-exercises, often referred to as “exercise snacks,” which are brief workouts that raise the heart rate, such as jogging in place, marching in place, jumping jacks, or going up and down a flight of stairs multiple times. Both VILPA and exercise snacks keep people moving, and they can be done at various times throughout the day.
Jonathan Little, a professor in the School of Health and Exercise Sciences at the University of British Columbia in Kelowna, BC, Canada, explained that VILPA can include any activity you do throughout your day, while exercise snacks tend to be more intentional bursts of activity.
Little says because VILPA and exercise snacks complement each other, they could help “move the needle” for people who feel discouraged by demanding exercise routines. Stamatakis, meanwhile, is planning future research that combines both VILPA and exercise snacks.
The potential problem with VILPA is that it can’t be scheduled. In Stamatakis’s studies, activity is classified in 10-second windows by Artificial Intelligence algorithms that learn to identify movements based on tracker data from people doing known movements. Stamatakis acknowledges that the techniques they’re using aren’t perfect. But, they hope to soon combine movement data with physiological data—such as heart rates—to create a more accurate picture of what exercisers are doing.
“This is a work in progress,” Stamatakis said. “I think we’re about two to three years away and we know it’s going to add accuracy to our predictions.”
Longevity Study Uses Trackers
Veerman was the lead author in a recent study that used data from activity trackers to examine how low physical activity reduces life expectancy and how life expectancy could be improved by increasing physical activity levels.
The study, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, converted all types of moderate and vigorous activities into the equivalent of walking and took into account the differences in intensity. The study also divided the activity levels into four categories.
The investigators found that a one-hour walk could add six hours to the lives of people in the least active group. In addition, Veerman said that the least active group might live about 11 years longer if they raised their overall activity levels to match those of the most active group.
“It can be any type of exercise but would roughly be the equivalent of just under three hours of walking per day,” Veerman said in a statement.
The research team suggested low levels of physical activity could even rival the negative effects of smoking, with other research finding each cigarette could take 11 minutes from a smoker’s life.
Study Shows Low Activity Levels Worldwide
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), at least 150 minutes (2.5 hours) of moderate-intensity physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous-intensity activity each week is necessary to achieve significant health benefits and reduce health risks. However, people globally are not meeting that goal.
Dr. Tessa Strain, an epidemiologist at the University of Edinburgh in Edinburgh, Scotland, led a study in which 507 surveys on physical activity were sent across 163 countries and territories. The survey results showed that nearly one-third of the respondents were not achieving the WHO’s target, and activity levels were trending lower.
Although the WHO’s target can be broken down to 30 minutes of exercise five times a week, even that amount of time “can seem onerous in a busy world,” Dr. Strain told BBC Science Focus.
However, for those who don’t have the time or inclination to attempt the WHO’s target, Strain notes that the WHO’s guidelines say that any amount of physical activity is better than none, and all physical activity counts. Experts say that exercise snacks count, too.
Stamatakis, Veerman, and Strain all believe that short bursts of activity can replace more traditional exercise routines, which have established health benefits.
“This isn’t about competing,” Stamatakis told BBC Science Focus. “Our main audience is people who, for whatever reason, can’t initiate and stick to an exercise program.”
Source Links:
https://www.sciencefocus.com/wellbeing/exercise-snacks
https://news.griffith.edu.au/2024/11/27/simple-secret-to-a-longer-life/
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241126215133.htm
https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/physical-activity
