Longevity Briefs: A Few Minutes Of Activity During Daily Tasks Could Significantly Reduce Mortality

Longevity briefs provides a short summary of novel research in biology, medicine, or biotechnology that caught the attention of our researchers in Oxford, due to its potential to improve our health, wellbeing, and longevity.

The problem:

Even small amounts of physical activity are associated with dramatic health benefits compared to no activity at all, resulting in significant reductions in risk of age-related disease and mortality. However, there are still many unanswered questions about how the type, duration and intensity of exercise affects its health benefits. One such question asks whether brief bursts of vigorous activity as part of daily life (such as rushing to catch a bus or hurrying up long flights of stairs) have a measurable impact on health, or whether these types of activity are simply too brief and intermittent to activate the physiological adaptations necessary for observable health benefits.

In the past, research into this kind of activity often depended on unreliable self-reported data, but improvements in wearable devices now allow such activity to be captured and recorded in a more objective way. In this study, researchers use wearable device data to explore the effects of ‘vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity’ (VILPA) in older individuals who did not participate in regular physical exercise.

The discovery:

Researchers found that more VILPA bouts throughout the day, or longer total durations of VILPA, were associated with significantly lower mortality from cancer and cardiovascular disease in people who did no other exercise.

In their study, researchers analysed wrist accelerometer data from the UK Biobank, a large anonymised medical database from the UK. This data included 25,241 nonexercisers (people who reported no leisure time physical activity) with a mean (average) age of 61.8 years. Participants wore accelerometers for at least three days and were followed up for an average of 6.9 years. VILPA was defined as short bouts of vigorous‑intensity activity occurring during daily life in bouts up to 1–2 minutes.

Around 3 short bouts of VILPA a day totalling 4.4 minutes was found to be the median level of activity (that is to say, 50% of participants did less VILPA than this). After adjusting for confounding factors like age, sex and lifestyle factors, researchers found that those at the sample median were 26%–30% less likely to die from cancer and from all causes, and a 32%–34% less likely to die from cardiovascular disease (the variation comes from the specifics of how VILPA was measured). Interestingly, results were similar when researchers repeated their analysis among over 60,000 biobank participants who did exercise, suggesting that this kind of vigorous activity is beneficial regardless of whether it is done as part of deliberate exercise routine or spontaneously throughout the day as part of daily living.

The implications:

This study suggests that small amounts of brief vigorous effort embedded in daily life – a few 1–2 minute bursts adding up to roughly 3–5 minutes per day – are associated with meaningful reductions in mortality in people who don’t do any other physical exercise. This is useful information as for many people – particularly older individuals – this will be the only form of physical exercise they engage in on a regular basis. It suggests that altering your daily routine to require more of these bouts to occur over the course of a day might be similarly beneficial to setting an equivalent amount of time aside for deliberate activity.

While this study may have measured physical activity in an objective way, the data is still observational in nature, meaning that it cannot prove causation as opposed to correlation. For example, a person who chooses the stairs instead of the lift or who goes shopping instead of getting deliveries might make these choices because they are already fitter and healthier.