{"id":278399,"date":"2025-11-12T14:31:35","date_gmt":"2025-11-12T14:31:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/278399\/"},"modified":"2025-11-12T14:31:35","modified_gmt":"2025-11-12T14:31:35","slug":"you-only-have-to-do-this-much-running-a-day-to-slash-your-risk-of-premature-death-by-35","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/278399\/","title":{"rendered":"You only have to do this much running a day to slash your risk of premature death by 35%"},"content":{"rendered":"

How much physical activity should you do to stay healthy? According the NHS guidelines, the answer is 150 to 300 minutes of moderate activity (like brisk walking<\/a> or easy cycling<\/a>) or 75 to 100 minutes of vigorous activity (like running, climbing stairs quickly and so on). <\/p>\n

As the mathematicians among you will have deduced, these recommendations are based on the idea that one minute of vigorous exercise is worth two minutes of moderate exercise. However, a new study<\/a> suggests that it\u2019s time for a recount. Vigorous activity, it seems, may be exponentially more beneficial for health outcomes than first thought. <\/p>\n

Specifically, the data suggests that just under six minutes of vigorous activity \u2013 let\u2019s go with running \u2013 can reduce your risk of all-cause mortality (aka premature death) by 35%. <\/p>\n

What everyone’s reading<\/p>\n

To get the same benefits from moderate activity, meanwhile, you have to do more than 21 minutes. <\/p>\n

The study<\/p>\n

The study looked at 73,485 adults who had valid data from seven days of continuous activity tracking. This allowed the researchers to track their movement intensity. Participants were then followed for eight years via national health registries to track things such as all-cause mortality, cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes. <\/p>\n

Three activity intensities were established: light (slow walking), moderate (brisk walking and easy cycling), vigorous (running, climbing stairs quickly and rowing).<\/p>\n

When the researchers crunched the data, it became clear that intensity mattered. Vigorous activity provided the best life-lengthening benefits, moderate activity provided meaningful but smaller benefits and light activity provided only modest improvements.<\/p>\n

To put this into perspective, one minute of vigorous activity was found to be the equivalent of four minutes of moderate activity and 53 minutes of light activity in terms of reducing all-cause mortality. <\/p>\n

When it comes to cardiovascular disease, vigorous activity was even more potent: one minute was equivalent to eight minutes of moderate activity and 73 minutes of light activity. <\/p>\n

The message for runners<\/p>\n

Congratulations \u2013 your hobby is improving your chances of a long and healthy life. It\u2019s also worth noting that all forms of running (easy, tempo, intervals and so on) are deemed \u2018vigorous\u2019, so this isn\u2019t your queue to run intervals seven days a week. Once is enough for heart health and fitness gains.<\/p>\n

Equally, if you\u2019re someone who focuses purely on light or moderate exercise, take this as your cue to add in a little more vigorous movement \u2013 your heart will thank you for it. <\/p>\n

Why is higher intensity exercise good for the heart? It triggers advantageous cardiac adaptions, such as improved stroke volume and maximal oxygen uptake (aka VO2 max<\/a>). And you don\u2019t get these adaptations as efficiently \u2013 or potentially at all \u2013 when working at a much lower intensity. <\/p>\n

Related Story<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"How much physical activity should you do to stay healthy? According the NHS guidelines, the answer is 150…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":278400,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[49,48,782,126995,784,407,787,84,783,126994],"class_list":{"0":"post-278399","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-fitness","8":"tag-ca","9":"tag-canada","10":"tag-content-type-news","11":"tag-contentid-4923ca6b-8f2e-4834-af15-410df19d862e","12":"tag-displaytype-standard-article","13":"tag-fitness","14":"tag-hasproduct-true","15":"tag-health","16":"tag-locale-gb","17":"tag-shorttitle-you-only-have-to-do-this-much-running-a-day-to-slash-your-risk-of-premature-death-by-35"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278399","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=278399"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/278399\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/278400"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=278399"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=278399"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=278399"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}