Most people don’t need a reminder that daily exercise is important. But some might need to know that when it comes to exercising, the more intense it is, it makes your heart rate rise, the heart pound stronger, and more calories are burned.
Scientists have also discovered that although a quick daily 15-minute brisk walk is enough to help cut down the risk of heart disease, doing a 30-minute leisurely stroll is not. By looking at data from heart-rate wearables, they found that doing more exercise doesn’t necessarily do much to lessen your risk of cardiovascular conditions, unless of course you do it at least in a moderate intensity.
What this means is that for those that did more exercise overall, yet the amount of moderate to vigorous exercise basically remained the same, there wasn’t much improvement to their heart health.
The scientists, who are from the NIH Care Research Center at Cambridge, explain that such easy activities like doing laundry or washing the car – which were said to be exercise in former research – are not enough to lessen the risk of heart problems.
But, for those that accomplish at least two brisk walks for an hour and fifteen minutes in a week, or even just one run for the same amount of time in a week, is enough to lower the risk of these heart conditions popping up.
Although this is considered the ‘bare minimum’ when it comes to preventing elevated risk of heart disease, such as stroke and coronary artery disease that are normally connected with sedentary life more common these days, they also need to know that this is not to be seen as ‘enough’ to improve cardiovascular strength either.
The study took data via an activity tracker that was worn on the wrists of more than 88,000 middle-aged adults. Later on, their heart health was also followed up on average of at least 7 years.
They discovered that when the activity levels doubled, there was no significant boost to their heart health. But with moderate to vigorous activity, they remained at 10%. However, for the vigorous proportion, it rose by at least 20%, while disease risk fell by 23%. Moreover, when it rose by 40%, the disease risk lowered by 40%.
In addition, the rates of heart disease were 14% when there was moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, which accounted for 20% rather that the 10% of the overall physical activity, even for those that didn’t exercise that much.
In this, they saw that the difference was equal to turning a daily 30-minute stroll into a brisk 15-minute walk. Evidently, those that did the most exercise overall, as well as those that did tougher and harder exercises, also had a lowered risk of developing heart disease.
These findings, which were found through a wrist accelerometer data that was gathered from the health information of 88,000 people stored in the UK Biobank. This is a very large database that contains the health information of at least half a million Brits.
Moreover, most of the big existing studies have depended on the questionnaire responses of people on their workout routines and how much exercise they did. Nonetheless, it’s difficult to remember physical activity levels, more so when they are low-intensity activities like doing laundry or washing the car.
Senior author, Professor Tom Yates of Leicester University, explained, “Our findings support simple behavior-change messages that ‘every move counts’ to encourage people to increase their overall physical activity, and if possible to do so by incorporating more moderately intense activities.”
He added, “This could be as simple as converting a leisurely stroll into a brisk walk, but a variety of approaches should encourage and help individuals to find whatever is most practical or enjoyable for them.”
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