15-minute daily exercise is 'bare minimum for health'
21 August BBC
Just 15 minutes of exercise a day can boost life expectancy by three
years and cut death risk by 14%, research from Taiwan suggests.
Experts in The Lancet say this is the least amount of activity an
adult can do to gain any health benefit. This is about half the quantity
currently recommended in the UK. Meanwhile, work in the British Journal
of Sports Medicine suggests a couch potato lifestyle with six hours of
TV a day cuts lifespan by five years.
The UK government recently updated its exercise advice to have a more
flexible approach, recommending adults get 150 minutes of activity a
week.
This could be a couple of 10-minute bouts of activity every day or
30-minute exercise sessions, five times a week, for example.
Experts say this advice still stands, but that a minimum of 15
minutes a day is a good place to start for those who currently do little
or no exercise.
The Lancet study, based on a review of more than 400,000 people in
Taiwan, showed 15 minutes per day or 90 minutes per week of moderate
exercise, such as brisk walking, can add three years to your life.
And people who start to do more exercise tend to get a taste for it
and up their daily quota, the researchers from the National Health
Research Institutes, Taiwan, and China Medical University Hospital
found.
More exercise led to further life gains. Every additional 15 minutes
of daily exercise further reduced all-cause death rates by 4%. And
research from Australia on health risks linked to TV viewing suggest too
much time sat in front of the box can shorten life expectancy,
presumably because viewers who watch a lot of telly do little or no
exercise.
England's Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies said: "Physical activity
offers huge benefits and these studies back what we already know - that
doing a little bit of physical activity each day brings health benefits
and a sedentary lifestyle carries additional risks." She added: "We hope
these studies will help more people realise that there are many ways to
get exercise, activities like walking at a good pace or digging the
garden over can count too."
Prof Stuart Biddle, an expert in exercise psychology at Loughborough
University, said a lot of people in the UK now fall into the category of
inactive or sedentary.
He said that aiming for 30 minutes of exercise a day on pretty much
every day of the week might seem too challenging for some, but starting
low and building up could be achievable.re is always better, but less is
a good place to start."
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