Climbing a flight or two of stairs instead of taking the elevator or sprinting for the bus instead of waiting for the next one could do more for your health than just burn a few extra calories.
“You don’t have to run marathons or go to the gym for hours. Even 15 to 20 minutes of vigorous activity spread throughout the week in short bursts was associated with meaningful risk reductions in our study,” says Minxue Shen, PhD, a coauthor of the study and a professor at the Xiangya School of Public Health at Central South University in Hunan, China.
“The key message is that intensity matters, even in small amounts,” says Dr. Shen. “If you already do moderate activity, like brisk walking, you can get additional benefits by adding a few short bursts of vigorous effort when you’re able. That could mean walking faster for a few minutes, taking the stairs, or doing a quick uphill walk.”
Quick Exercise Bursts Were Tied to Lower Disease Risk
To arrive at these findings, researchers took advantage of wearable fitness tracker data from nearly 100,000 participants in the UK Biobank.
Using a week’s worth of data, scientists quantified each person’s total physical movement, along with the proportion of activity that was vigorous enough to make them out of breath. Then they compared these results with how many participants developed eight chronic health conditions over the following seven years.
The results showed that, compared with people who didn’t get any vigorous activity at all, people with the highest proportion of vigorous activity had a:
- 63 percent lower risk of developing dementia
- 60 percent lower risk of developing type 2 diabetes
- 46 percent lower risk of dying
In addition, researchers found that the amount of vigorous activity was more important in some conditions than others. For example:
“Our study suggests that for some conditions — like immune and inflammatory diseases — focusing on intensity may be particularly important, whereas for others, like diabetes and liver disease, getting a good total volume of activity also matters a lot,” says Shen.
“We expected that higher-intensity activity would be beneficial, but we were struck by how much more important intensity was than total volume for certain diseases.”
The findings “advance the conversation from ‘how much’ activity to also include ‘how hard,’” says J. Sawalla Guseh II, MD, a sports cardiologist, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, and the director of the cardiovascular performance program at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, who was not involved in the new research.
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The findings suggest that vigorous activity may trigger stronger responses in the body than moderate activity, Shen says. This includes improvements in heart and lung fitness, insulin sensitivity, inflammation, and blood pressure regulation, which researchers say likely contribute to the reduced risk of metabolic, cardiovascular, and neurological conditions.
Aaron L. Baggish, MD, a sports cardiologist and the founder of the cardiovascular performance program at Massachusetts General Hospital, who also was not involved with the study, says the findings confirm the protective effect of physical activity across all forms of noncommunicable disease.
“The intensity of physical activity used to define vigorous [in the study] was not extreme endurance sports or crazy levels of exercise,” he says. “This paper simply uses wearable metrics to reinforce a time-honored truth: Movement with purpose has huge health benefits.”
The Study Has Some Limitations
As the authors point out, the study is observational, so it doesn’t prove cause and effect. In addition, it was not very racially diverse.
“The main weakness is that the study sample, while large, is overly represented by individuals with European ancestry. Whether the findings are representative of other population groups is therefore unknown at this time,” says Kathryn Weston, PhD, a senior lecturer of physical activity for health at the University of Strathclyde in Scotland, and not an author of the research.
In addition, Dr. Guseh says the study may have oversimplified what kind of activity counted as intense, because people can have significant variation in baseline fitness levels. “Fundamentally, there is a strong possibility that healthier individuals are simply more capable of higher-intensity activity,” he says.
How to Get More Movement Bursts Into Your Routine
You don’t necessarily need to spend more time exercising to reap these potential health benefits, the experts say. Just add intensity to some of your existing physical movements.
“Prioritize bursts of movement every day that are more intense than what is comfortable for most,” says Dr. Baggish.
That will probably look different for everyone. “For some less-conditioned population groups, even brisk walking or walking on an incline can be approaching vigorous-intensity activity,” Dr. Weston says.
Instead of structured workouts, the experts offered the following movement suggestions.
- Walk briskly up a flight of stairs.
- Carry heavy groceries.
- Walk fast to catch a bus.
- Play tag with children or grandchildren.
- Cycle or run in short bursts.
- Garden or shovel vigorously.
- Move furniture or do other forms of heavy housework.
“The practical takeaway is not that people need to pursue extreme exercise. Rather, in addition to moving regularly, there is value in occasionally challenging yourself. Over time, that helps build fitness,” says Guseh.
“As people become fitter, they naturally accumulate more higher-effort activity, even if it doesn’t feel particularly intense to them.”
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