The Olympics offer a fascinating window into the diets and workout routines of some of the world’s finest athletes, and it would be easy to feel inadequate in the face of these examples of the human body’s awesome potential.
We tend to gravitate to extraordinary outliers, like the athletes in the Winter Games. Lindsay Vonn’s maniacal pursuit of Olympic glory, skiing on a torn ACL only to crash and break her femur, is treated as aspirational. If you’re not pushing yourself to the absolute limit, then what’s the point? One way to interpret the enormous gaps between the share of Americans who say exercising more is important and the share who actually get enough exercise is that people become daunted by what they think is necessary — and give up.
But we shouldn’t think that way. In fact, a major new study should reframe how we think about physical activity and our health.
Sign up for the Good Medicine newsletter
Our political wellness landscape has shifted: new leaders, shady science, contradictory advice, broken trust, and overwhelming systems. How is anyone supposed to make sense of it all? Vox’s senior correspondent Dylan Scott has been on the health beat for more than a decade, and every week, he’ll wade into sticky debates, answer fair questions, and contextualize what’s happening in American health care policy. Sign up here.
We end up talking so much about exercise. One of the pleasures of following Olympics every two years is the coverage of the extreme — and truly bizarre — lengths to which world-class athletes go to gain an edge.
But those extreme fitness obsessions can be misguided. My colleague Hannah Seo recently asked experts whether there is such a thing as too much exercise. And they told her, actually, yes, for most people, at a certain point, there are diminishing returns.
The big benefits are for people who are otherwise not active and start to do something. And, according to this remarkable new research, the threshold for seeing real health benefits is shockingly low. Forget too much exercise; there’s really no such thing as too little exercise. Every minute helps. A little movement can save your life.
And even if you do exercise, this is advice you should heed. Exercise has numerous benefits. But most of us have busy lives; our careers are not dedicated to our bodies. Trying to squeeze your routine into its own little time slot is tempting. If you can find the right 30-minute workout to fit into your schedule, you’ll be all set.
You’re not Lindsay Vonn, after all.
But there is also a danger in thinking of exercise as its own isolated activity, something you do for a specific, short period of time before you move on with the rest of your day. A half hour of rigorous exercise is great. But if the rest of your time is spent on the couch, you rapidly start to lose those benefits.
Instead, we should think not only about exercise but movement — and how to keep ourselves moving throughout the day. That was the big takeaway from the recent research published in the Lancet that showed even small bursts of activity — as little as 5 to 10 minutes — and being less sedentary can have huge health benefits.
And if you don’t have a workout routine, don’t worry. That was the authors’ real message: Just move a little bit, and you — yes, you — can do yourself a lot of good.
More “realistic” exercise goals could still yield big health benefits
The Lancet study was a massive effort, involving researchers from Norway, Sweden, Spain, Australia, and the United States. They set out specifically to document a relationship between exercise and mortality. Pre-existing research hadn’t provided a clear picture of that, often relying on self-reported data from participants, which can be unreliable. And previous studies also tended to only narrowly evaluate whether participants were meeting specific public health recommendations for exercise — which, as the authors note, is not always realistic for people.
The researchers reviewed large data sets, involving tens of thousands of participants, that tracked physical activity through a wearable device and measured it in small increments of time. With that data, they could identify the effect of even short intervals of movement — standing up and walking a lap around your house, for example. They analyzed the effects for both the people whose tracking data showed they were the most sedentary, or active on average for only two minutes per day, and the broader population (excluding the most active 20 percent of people, based on the tracking data collected). They used the activity data to estimate the mortality risk for different levels of physical movement and sedentariness and then estimated what would happen if people were to be a little more active or a little less sedentary.
And what they found was striking.
For the most sedentary people, an increase in their moderate (brisk walking, riding a bike) to vigorous (running, swimming) physical activity of just 5 minutes per day appeared to prevent as many as 6 percent of deaths from any cause among that population. For the broader population, 10 percent of all deaths may be prevented. Reducing the amount of time they were sedentary by 30 minutes every day — not even getting their heart rate up to exercise levels, just literally moving around — was associated with 3 percent fewer deaths among high-risk participants and 7 percent fewer deaths among all but those most active people.
With any new study, you should reserve some skepticism. But whether a little movement reduces your chances of death by 10 percent or by 5, the point stands: A walk around the block every hour or two can still help extend your life. Even if you do exercise, you should still think about how to reduce your sedentary time; just an extra half hour of movement every day looks like a boon to most people’s health.
In other words: Sure, you’re not an Olympic athlete, but you don’t have to be.
