New research stuff: a big study spanning over 110K healthy people looked at the physical activity practices and mortality over the course of decades.
What's clear:
- Physical activity is broadly associated with lower mortality. Are you shocked? I am not shocked.
- Doing more than one type of physical activity offers further benefit – even if the total amount of activity is the same.
- Walking is tremendous. When in doubt, add some.
- Physical activity offers cumulative (but diminishing) returns. In other words, more is better but the line flattens over time.
So, here’s THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I’LL TELL YOU TODAY:
The next step you take toward increasing your physical activity will offer disproportionately high returns. The idea of holding back because you think whatever you’ll be doing too little is… well, it’s very, very incorrect. Don’t be a silly goose.
What’s less clear:
- Some activities (including strength training) were only collected in later questionnaire cycles or in one cohort, so we are not entirely comparing apples to apples.
- Some of the curves are funny but not funny ha ha. For example, the bicycling curve looks like a little is good, a moderate amount is bad, and then a lot is terrific. Maybe there’s an awkward growing-your-hair-out phase to biking but it’s more likely that the problem here is not having enough good data.
What’s interesting and noteworthy
- There were far more women (70K) than men (40K) included. A common and legitimate complaint is that research tends to overrepresent men. This is partially an artifact of bygone days and partially a practical choice to sidestep greater variability in women (via hormone cycles and potential pregnancies).
- The subjects were mostly white health professionals, so there are likely some nuances missing for other populations.
- Research like this doesn’t tend look at calories burned but at MET(metabolic equivalent) hours. 1 MET is a body at rest. But your body and some random dude’s body may have different metabolic requirements. So your METs may be different than theirs. Same deal for activity, which revs your METs higher.
If you search for a MET calculator, you will see that your body weight, the activity type and the activity intensity all go into crunching the particular numbers.
Let’s say you wanted to hit 10 more MET hours per week. That might look like:
Easy
30 minutes of moderately brisk walking per day
Moderate
1:40 of easy jogging or fast walking spread across the week
~3 hours of challenging but approachable resistance training per week
Hard
About an hour of intense cycling, hard running, or competitive play per week
About two hours of very spicy resistance training per week
