Receive our unique vitiligo formula, completely FREE of charge!

Longevity

Longevity Briefs: The Best Way To Exercise For Longevity

Posted on 4 October 2024

Getting your Trinity Audio player ready...

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:

Everyone knows that getting more exercise is associated with living longer, but what does ‘more exercise’ actually mean? Exercising harder (intensity) or for longer (duration) are both ways in which you might perform a higher total amount of work (volume). For a long time, it was assumed that longer sessions were important to get the most out of exercise, but is that really the case? Recent studies suggest that inactivity itself is bad for health and that breaking up inactivity with exercise, even briefly, might be highly beneficial.

The discovery:

In this study, researchers looked at data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES). Just over 7500 participants were selected and had a median age of 49 (this means that half of the participants were older than 49). The median BMI of the participants was 28kg/m^2, meaning that over half of participants were overweight or obese.

Researchers then used data from wrist accelerometers that participants had worn for a week in order to calculate exercise volume and intensity. They found that both volume and intensity of exercise were strongly correlated with reduced all-cause mortality among participants, but intensity seemed to be more beneficial, resulting in a roughly 6-fold reduction in mortality for optimal intensity vs the lowest intensity, compared to a 4-fold reduction for optimal volume. Both too much volume and too high intensity exercise started to increase risk again slightly, but to nowhere near the risk of not doing enough.

Risk of death from all causes according to intensity (top) and volume (bottom) of exercise.
Intensity or volume: the role of physical activity in longevity 

In addition, the researchers developed a metric for measuring how fragmented a person’s exercise was throughout the day – the MX ratio. This is derived by identifying a person’s most intense period of activity during the day that lasted X minutes, then piecing together the most intense fragments of activity from throughout the day totalling X minutes, and dividing the first value by the second one. If that’s too hard to follow, all you really need to know is that a higher ratio indicates that a person’s physical activity is less fragmented. What they found was that, assuming overall intensity was the same, a higher MX ratio was associated with lower all-cause mortality – sporadic exercise was worse than lumping it all into one session.

The implications:

This study suggests that it might be more valuable to push up the intensity of the exercise you are already doing before increasing its duration. It also suggests that while all exercise is good, a single bout of exercise is better than an equivalent duration and intensity of exercise scattered throughout the day. However, it’s probably too early to be making assumptions. The relationship between exercise and health is very hard to study because there are so many confounding factors. A sporadic exercise routine or an aversion to high-intensity exercise could be symptoms of other lifestyle factors that could be exerting their own effects on mortality, not all of which could be controlled for due to lack of data. A big one was smoking, which could severely limit high-intensity performance due to reduced pulmonary and cardiovascular health. We’ll keep you up to date as our understanding of these relationships evolve.


Never Miss a Breakthrough!

Sign up for our newletter and get the latest breakthroughs direct to your inbox.

    References

    Intensity or volume: the role of physical activity in longevity https://doi.org/10.1093/eurjpc/zwae295

    Title image by Joshua Sukoff, Upslash

    Featured in This Post
    Topics

    Never Miss a Breakthrough!

    Sign up for our newletter and get the latest breakthroughs direct to your inbox.

      Copyright © Gowing Life Limited, 2024 • All rights reserved • Registered in England & Wales No. 11774353 • Registered office: Ivy Business Centre, Crown Street, Manchester, M35 9BG.