A study reveals that people who practice short periods of intense physical activity have a 38 to 40% lower risk of premature death.
You don’t like going to the gym or doing running ? It doesn’t have to be serious. To be in good healthit would be enough to carry out a few daily intense activities to reduce the risk of premature mortality. It is in any case what a study shows conducted by scientists from the University of Sydney in Australia and published in December in the journal Nature Medicine.
Three short and intense activities
Scientists have been tracking for almost seven years more than 25,000 people whose average age was 61.8, the study reads. They studied the link between what they call vigorous intermittent physical activity (VILPA) and the risk of death from all causes: cardiovascular illnesses, cancers… In order not to have distorted results, they also took into account certain factors such as the consumption of tobacco and drugs, age, sex.
Thus, research shows that adults who manage to accumulate three short bursts of intense activity every day has between 38 and 40% less risk of premature death than the most sedentary. In addition, participants who engage in these activities for about 4.4 min per day not only show a 26% to 30% reduction in the risk of all-cause mortality but also a 32% to 34% reduction in the risk of cardiovascular mortality.
Play, walk, take the stairs…
“It could be things like play with children. You may see your bus about to leave and need to walk extremely fast to catch the bus. You may live in an apartment building and have to carry your groceries up a flight of stairs”illustrated Mark Hamer, professor of sports and exercise medicine at University College London and co-author of the study. “It’s these kinds of small gusts that would happen in everyday life”he explained to The Guardian who spotted the study.
Generally, it is recommended to practice 30 minutes of physical activity per day. Health Insurance recommends gradually reducing the total sedentary time to less than 7 hours per day between sunrise and sunset.
“The message that everything counts is really good”he added. “I think most people can probably try to be more active in everyday life and that doesn’t mean you have to join a gym.”
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