Exercising for only three to four one-minute bursts each day while going about daily duties is related with considerable decreases in the risk of early death, especially from cardiovascular disease.
The research team, based out of Australia’s Charles Perkins Centre at the University of Sydney, has just had their findings published in Nature Medicine. It is the first study to quantitatively assess the health advantages of VILPA, or vigorous intermittent physical activity.
VILPA refers to the short bursts of high-intensity physical activity (up to one or two minutes) that we engage in frequently throughout the day. These include things like sprinting to catch the bus, power walking for a few minutes while running errands, and engaging in high-energy games with the kids.
Study participants who engaged in three to four daily one-minute sessions of VILPA had a 40-50% reduction in all-cause and cancer-related mortality, and a 49-50% reduction in death due to cardiovascular disease.
Professor Stamatakis noted that the study shows how incidental physical activity can overcome several barriers, including the fact that most persons aged 40 and up do not participate in regular exercise or sport.
Interestingly, the same results were discovered when comparing the strenuous activity levels of 62,000 adults who regularly exercised. This suggests that the health advantages of strenuous activity remain unchanged regardless of whether it is performed as part of scheduled exercise or as part of housekeeping.
The activity of over 25,000 people who self-reported as “non-exercisers,” that is, people who do not engage in sports or exercise during their free time, was measured by using data from wrist-worn trackers from UK Biobank, a large-scale biological database.
Using this strategy, the researchers were able to deduce that the participants’ recorded physical activity was simply incidental movement throughout the course of their normal activities.
The group was able to track participants for up to seven years because to the health records they were given access to.
Studies are observational, thus they cannot prove a cause-and-effect relationship. Researchers were careful to control for any confounds in the data, such as disparities in participants’ health.
