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Want to add years to your life, but you never exercise? What if you just had to exercise vigorously for one minute every day? Do you think you could handle that? Because that could be the difference between living and dying.
You don’t even have to do the vigorous exercise full a full minute. You can break it up into six activities that are 10 seconds each. Or four activities that take 15 seconds each. It’s that simple.
The study, published on the pre-print server medRxiv, used a nationally representative sample of 3,293 American adults who self-reported no participation in structured exercise in the 2011-14 National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). According to Emmanuel Stamatakis at the University of Sydney in Australia, reported that the people in the NHANES were “more overweight and obese, on average, and they do much less physical activity” than a 2023 study in which 4.4 minutes of vigorous activities per day resulted in a 38 percent less likelihood of dying after seven or eight years.
With the NHANES group, researchers recorded exercise lasting up to one minute using a wrist-worn accelerometer. After 6.7 years, a total of 290 people had passed away. According to their research, just 1.1 minutes of strenuous activity per day lowered a person’s chances of dying by 38 percent – the same number as the previous study. This despite the subjects in the new study being in worse physical shape.
“The authors suggest, and I agree, that this may reflect a more inactive, higher-risk population deriving greater benefit from small amounts of vigorous activity,” Carlos Celis-Morales at the University of Glasgow in the UK told New Scientist. “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 likely low fitness, the scope for improvement is larger.”
So while sitting around binge-watching your favorite TV shows might be good for your brain, don’t forget to get up and move around every once in awhile.