560-610 minutes of exercise a week needed for substantial heart benefits

stevenwoo

This is a change from the prior roughly 150 minutes and looks to scale depending upon the subject's starting fitness - higher fitness can get by with less, lower fitness needs to hit the higher duration numbers.

pmarreck

Cool, now combine this with being a parent of young kids in a 2-income family without any other assistance.

Simulacra

I think this would be tough for a lot of people ... that's 10 hours of exercise. I walk 5+ miles a day which takes me roughly an hour and a half. I'm only getting five to 7 hours.. Not sure I have the time in the day to add another three.

lostmsu

At this rate you get more lifespan not exercising. 10h a week out of your waking time is about 9%. No way your heart health gonna give you that much.

umvi

That's like 90 minutes of exercise a day if you take zero rest days... Not happening for most people. I think even marathon training requires less than 90 minutes a day on average.

comrade1234

A lot of this sounds very different than other studies that have said small amounts of exercise have substantial benefits. I was always a little suspicious when they would say that you only need moderate exercise like walking because when you do vigorous exercise your blood vessels expand up to 3x diameter, keeping your arteries supple and elastic. You just don't get that by walking.

marricks

> Those adults who met the 150 minute a week guideline on exercise experienced a modest 8-9% reduction in cardiovascular risk 30%+ reduction from 10 hours a week of exercise sounds ideal, but 9% isn't nothing.

dumbdumb125

There are multiple comprehensive umbrella reviews on the subject. Synthesis of knowledge synthesis. Tens of thousands of study subjects over decades and decades. 15 MET hours above 3 METs gain 70% of the possible benefits from cardio. Not exactly contradictory results, but it makes this sound like bullshit.

Ronsenshi

Important point is that study was done on participants with average age of 57. And by "substantial" benefit they mean reduction in cardiovascular events by 30% compared to around 10% for people who do 150 minutes of exercise a week. I wonder if healthy diet also plays role in the outcome.

noelwelsh

> Those adults who met the 150 minute a week guideline on exercise experienced a modest 8-9% reduction in cardiovascular risk, the study found. This was consistent across all levels of fitness. > In order to achieve substantial protection, classed as a greater than 30% risk reduction, between 560 and 610 minutes of moderate to vigorous exercise a week was needed. So 30 minutes a day is still good, but more is better. Seems reasonable. Also exercise doesn't mean planned / scheduled exercise, like going to the gym. Daily activities can count, like cycling to the train station for example. Which gets to one of my favorite hobby horses: increasing exercise at the population level is an urban design problem.

giwook

I'm not convinced. I may be misunderstanding how the study was conducted, but it sounds like a more reasonable conclusion to draw from the study is that those who tend to have better health outcomes and longer healthspans/lifespans are the ones who also are willing to prioritize their health and physical fitness and are willing to spend this much time on exercise. The average age of participants in the study was 57, so you're already narrowing in on a very specific and pretty narrow subset of the population when you're looking at seniors who are also spending 10 hours a week on exercise. While 560-610 minutes of moderate to vigorous physical activity certainly helps, I'd think these are individuals who are generally abstaining from smoking, will try to eat healthy at least moderately often, stay away from overconsumption of fast food or alcohol, etc. Basically, it sounds like there is a degree of correlation here between habits and outcomes that is being conflated with causation.

declan_roberts

Combined with retatrutide or other GLP-1 agonist peptides and that number is probably significantly smaller.

stared

Without a control group, correlation is not causation. So the opening sentence is misleading, exaggerated, or maybe even plain false: > Adults should aim to do between 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity to achieve a substantial reduction in the risk of heart attacks and stroke, suggest the findings of an observational study published online in the British Journal of Sports Medicine. It is highly likely that healthier people exercise more (and the bedridden exercise way less). Also, who exercise more: people who care about their health in general, who don't overwork themselves, who have disposable time and income. For example, an older person's walking pace is strongly correlated with their remaining life years. If we force these people to walk faster, they won't outrun death - we would very likely just increase their mortality.

jeffbee

The headline relies entirely on the definition of "substantial". Anyway, the statistics and logic of the paper appear sound at first reading, but I'm interested in why they censored participants with cycling VO2(max) over 55 as "implausible". Well, on second thought, a potential flaw of this analysis is that calculating MVPA from medical accelerometer data has a huge blind spot. Bicycling is invisible to those devices, as is any other activity that doesn't move your wrist, like leg presses.

solumos

> Adults should aim to do between 560 and 610 minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity > Observational study Can we stop doing this please?

bzmrgonz

wow, that's a lot of time... I wonder if we can offset that time by doing one HIIT exercise a week. there's a group of people trying to crank up SPRINTING-SATURDAYS as a thing on youtube (sprintingproject). I like the idea because the body has 6 days to recover, there's no way to cause damage with 6 day recovery.

croes

How wealthy are those who have time to spend 10 hours on exercise?

sva_

It makes me feel better about my cycling addiction. Although I wonder how healthy ultra distances are (cycling all day, which I frequently do on at least 1 day of the weekend)

oogabooga67

So this study was on adults aged 40-69, over 8 years or so. And then they had 500k possible people, of which 200k or so had accelerometer data, and then 17k or so of those actually had done a vo2max test, which they admit might select for a slightly healthier population. I don't know if you can say much if anything close to the headline from looking at this data. I guess the one interesting thing is that they only had accelerometer data, so i guess maybe this wouldnt undercount activity minutes the way my garmin does (i can do a lot before i cross 100bpm or whatever the threshold is). It seems like a lot here depends on how you try to measure this activity. Garmin uses the hr mostly i think so basically most of my stepcount is ignored. Pure accelerometer data underrepresents resistance training and overrepresents relatively low energy fidgeting. I feel like this is a garbage study tbh. Or a mid study with a garbage headline slapped on it.

josefritzishere

9-10 hours seems like a lot. That's very discouraging.