MONTREAL — Small amounts of vigorous physical effort sprinkled throughout the day can reduce the risk of major cardiovascular events in women by almost half, a new study shows.
These results add to those of other studies which already indicated that the cumulative effect of each minute of physical activity practiced each day ends up generating considerable benefits.
The authors of the new study calculated that between 1.5 minutes and four minutes of vigorous physical activity per day, such as jogging up stairs or carrying heavy bags of groceries, can significantly reduce the risk of cardiovascular incident in participants who do not wish to – or are unable to – participate in structured physical activity.
“With accelerometers, you can watch things like running to the bus or carrying groceries upstairs, these short bursts of (physical) activity that we don’t register mentally, but do throughout the lifespan. day and can increase our heart rate,” explained Professor Scott Lear of Simon Fraser University in British Columbia.
Researchers studied just over 81,000 middle-aged UK Biobank participants, both men and women, who were asked to wear a fitness tracker for seven consecutive days, 24 hours a day. , between 2013 and 2015.
After dividing the participants into those who were physically active and those who were not, and after taking into account different factors, the researchers found that women who averaged 3.4 minutes of intermittent physical activity and high intensity of daily living (or VILPA, according to the English acronym) per day reduced their risk of major adverse cardiovascular events by 45%, their risk of heart attack by 51% and their risk of failure by 67% heart rate, compared to those who did not include any VILPA in their day.
An average of 1.2 minutes to 1.6 minutes of VILPA per day lowered the risk of major adverse cardiovascular events in women by 30%, the risk of heart attack by 33%, and the risk of heart failure by 40%.
The effect was less pronounced in men. Those who averaged 5.6 minutes of VILPA per day reduced their risk of a major adverse cardiovascular event by 16%. At least 2.3 minutes of VILPA per day reduced the risk of cardiovascular events by 11%.
“The effect was still in the right direction for men, but the difference was not statistically significant,” Professor Lear said.
No benefit from VILPA was observed in participants who were already physically active.
The researchers explain that these findings are particularly important for women, since women tend to have poorer cardiorespiratory fitness than men at any age. This could also explain why the benefits of VILPA seem more pronounced in women than in men.
“This again helps us understand the value of the little bursts of activity that we have but don’t recognize,” Professor Lear said. We may be doing them, but we don’t realize it.”
Current recommendations are 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per day, or walking for around 30 minutes almost every day. However, Professor Lear pointed out, when it comes to physical activity, most people “get closer to zero.”
That being said, he continues, “we know that even those who respect half of these recommendations do better than the others. They are less sick and have a lower risk of premature death than those who do nothing.
“A little is better than none, but a lot is better than a little,” said Professor Lear. And our study shows that these VILPAs, when we add them up, have a value. For most people, it’s probably realistic to do one or two minutes of vigorous physical activity a few times a day.”
The findings of this study were published by the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
