The amount of exercise needed to decrease premature deaths related to sedentary lifestyles has dropped

More than 44,000 participants were part of a study published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine, where sedentariness and exercise were considered to determine if the activity can influence how long people live. According to this new study, only 11 minutes are necessary to reduce the chances of developing sedentary-related conditions compared with previous investigations, where 35 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity were recommended. The participants were followed for some years, and the most sedentary group showed the highest risk of premature death, while the participants who showed physical activity, even if it wasn’t too intense, showed a reduction of this condition. During the last year, less physical activity has been reported; specifically, during this pandemic, many restrictions were put in place where exercise and outdoor activities were banned for a while; hence people spent more time inside their houses without any physical activity. This lack of activity has been part of multiple investigations through the years, in which premature death has been related to living a sedentary lifestyle. Over a million participants were part of sixteen studies in 2016, where the amount of moderate exercise established to decrease the harmful effects of sitting time was between 60 to 75 minutes. During this investigation, the participants’ amount of exercise wasn’t objective because activity monitors didn’t quantify it; therefore, the results could not be precise. After the investigation published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, where accelerometers were used to record the exact amount of exercise and rest by the individual, the investigators of the 2016 trial decided only to choose the part of the participants who registered the data using accelerometers, leaving around 50,000 which corresponds to 9% of the total sample. The results showed that most of the participants only exercised for two or three minutes each day and stayed in a resting mode for around 10 hours while being awake. Most of the participants were middle-aged and lived in the United States or Europe. A decade after, the lifestyles and life span of those participants were reviewed and separated into three groups. The first third showed that people who recorded less movement have a 260% more probability of premature death than the participants who recorded more physical activity; the investigators also considered factors like body mass and smoking habits during the study because they could influence the results.