Get More Exercise Benefits (Without Exercising More Or Harder!)

Everybody loves the benefits of exercise!

However, not everybody loves exercise itself. And even for those who do love exercise, we can’t always do as much as we’d like!

So, what’s this one all about it?

Variety really is the spice of life

Researchers (Dr. Qi Sun et al.) examined whether long-term engagement in individual physical activities and/or a greater variety of activities are associated with a 19% lower risk of death, independent of total activity volume.

111,467 people started the study, and 38,847 of them died before it was over.

It’s a little sad that experiments like this always have a large death toll, but let’s make sure it was worth it.

Added up together, this resulted in 2,431,381 person-years of data.

During the time that they had before the end, the participants recorded time spent in up to 11–13 different activities, with energy expenditure estimated using MET-hours* per week.

^{*Metabolic Equivalent of Task. This is a way of standardizing all exercises per how much energy is expended into them.}

Notably, higher total physical activity was linked to a lower risk of death, but benefits plateaued at around 20 weekly MET-hours, suggesting that after that point, more is not necessarily better.

Some activities were better than others for health outcomes: most activities were associated with lower all-cause mortality, but the strongest associations were seen for walking, racquet sports, rowing, callisthenics, weight training, running, jogging, and stair climbing, while swimming—surprisingly—showed no clear association.

We may hypothesize that swimming didn’t score so well as it’s neither particularly strong resistance work, nor is it necessarily training movements that are used a lot in daily life, and thus keeping that mobility.

It can do!

• For example, front crawl and backstroke are excellent for shoulder mobility, but…
• if you’re spending your swimming time on breast stroke, that’s half a range of motion, and…
• if you’re just sculling, that’s nothing at all beyond some mild cardio work.

Here’s the good part, though: engaging in a broader mix of activities was associated with a 19% lower risk of death from all causes, even after adjusting for total activity volume.

You can read the paper in full, here: Physical activity types, variety, and mortality: results from two prospective cohort studies

How to benefit the most

Clearly, what’s necessary here is to enjoy a wider variety of physical activities. And as the above science shows, you don’t have to do a lot at once!

See also: How Useful Is “Exercise Snacking”, Really?

If you do want to do a lot at once, then we recommend considering High-Intensity Interval Training (HIIT), but carefully:

How To Do HIIT (Without Wrecking Your Body) ← important, because the “high-intensity” part can cause problems for some people, if not undertaken attentively

Which can further be expanded to: HIIT, But Make It HIRT ← high-intensity resistance training, undertaken per HIIT principles

On which note, do see: Resistance Is Useful! (Especially As We Get Older) ← for more on resistance training methods in general

If you like that idea but don’t like gyms and weights and such, then don’t worry, we’ve got you covered: Resistance Beyond Weights

And finally, if you don’t like exercise in general, then check out these: No-Exercise Exercise!

Enjoy!