People who do several very short bouts of strenuous activity each day are much less likely to die in the next few years than those who do no exercise at all
By Michael Le Page
1 September 2025
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.”
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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.