There’s some great news for anyone out there hoping to reap maximum gains after putting in minimum effort. New research says that the bar for meaningful health benefits is lower than most of us think. So low that you can help extend your life by regularly putting in just five minutes of exercise a day.
A large study published in The Lancet analyzed wearable fitness data from more than 130,000 people across multiple countries. Researchers from the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences found that adding just five minutes of moderate-to-vigorous exercise per day, or even just cutting sitting time by 30 minutes, was associated with measurable improvements in lifespan.
The researchers split participants into groups, with particular focus on the least active 20 percent. For that high-risk group, a daily five-minute activity increase was linked to preventing up to 6 percent of deaths. Applied to the broader population, that number rose to 10 percent. Reducing sedentary time showed smaller but still meaningful benefits.
Basically, if you’re doing almost nothing, doing almost anything is definitely better.
This Is How Much Exercise Science Says It Takes to Live Longer
This wasn’t a long-term experiment where people were forced onto treadmills and covered in diodes. The researchers used statistical models to estimate how small changes in movement might affect mortality risk compared to their peers. That means the study can’t prove direct cause and effect, but the size of the dataset and consistency of the associations make a firm, if not definitive, case.
As you probably have guessed, the biggest gains were seen among people who moved the least and sat the most. Every movement counts, and the largest gains tend to come from getting inactive people to move even a little.
If your New Year’s Resolution was to be a little bit more active than you were last year, science is here to permit you to start small, because even a little bit of movement matters.
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