Briefly walking up a steep hill counts as exercise
Greg Balfour Evans/Alamy
If you don’t exercise for the sake of exercising, doing five or six vigorous activities, each lasting just 10 seconds or so every day, can make a big difference. A study in the US has found that people who did a total of just over 1 minute of vigorous activity each day were much less likely to die of any cause in the following six years than those who did none.
Only around 15 per cent of adults exercise regularly, says Emmanuel Stamatakis at the University of Sydney in Australia. “The majority of the adult population find it hard, or they’re not keen, or they’re not able to integrate regular exercise in their day-to-day routine.”
So Stamatakis and his colleagues have been exploring the health benefits of the incidental exercise people get, such as walking up a steep hill, playing energetically with children or carrying heavy loads. They did this by getting people who are already taking part in large health studies to wear monitors for one week to assess their normal activity levels, and then looking at their risk of dying in the following years.
In 2023, the researchers reported results from tens of thousands of people taking part in the UK Biobank study. They found that those who did around 4.4 minutes of vigorous activities a day were 38 per cent less likely to die of any cause in the following seven or eight years than those who did none.
Now, the team has reported the results from 3300 people taking part in the NHANES study in the US, who were generally less fit than those in the Biobank study. “They are a lot more overweight and obese, on average, and they do much less physical activity,” says Stamatakis.
In this group, just 1.1 minutes of vigorous activity a day was required to lower the risk of dying of any cause in the following six years by 38 per cent.
This means 1.1 minutes in this less-fit US group produced the same relative improvement as 4.4 minutes in the fitter UK group, but it doesn’t mean they reached the same level of health. The participants in the US study generally had a lower level of fitness to start off with, so their overall risk of dying of any cause was still higher.
“The authors suggest, and I agree, that this may reflect a more inactive, higher-risk population deriving greater benefit from small amounts of vigorous activity,” says Carlos Celis-Morales at the University of Glasgow in the UK. “This is what we call a ceiling effect: in people with high fitness levels, there is less room for improvement, while in inactive individuals with likely low fitness, the scope for improvement is larger.”
The results also add to the evidence that small amounts of vigorous incidental exercise can have big benefits. But this hasn’t yet been established beyond doubt, cautions Stamatakis. “Logically, it does make sense that it could have health benefits,” he says. “But with this type of study, you can never prove causation.”
His team is now planning further studies that can provide stronger evidence that the health benefits seen really are the result of doing more incidental exercise. The long-term aim is to find ways to increase the amount of exercise people get while doing everyday activities. “We will hopefully one day be able to intervene to assist people to increase their incidental activity without having to go to gyms,” says Stamatakis.
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