A new study finds that US health officials’ guidelines for physical activity — markers that the vast majority of Americans fail to reach — still fall short for a person looking to maximize their lifespan.
Researchers at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, found that meeting guidelines set by the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) in 2018 is probably not enough. For a person to limit their risk of all-cause mortality as much as possible, they would likely need to double or quadruple the requirements every week.
HHS recommends every American adult get at least 2.5 hours of aerobic exercise every week — or half that if the activity is intense.
However, Americans already largely fail to meet these guidelines. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) announced earlier this week that only about half of Americans hit the fitness marker.
A sedentary lifestyle has been a major contributor to America’s problems with diet-related diseases. The CDC reports that more than 70 percent of Americans are overweight and over 40 percent are obese. Just over 10 percent have also made diabetes and heart disease the top killers in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Researchers found that meeting baseline aerobic fitness goals could significantly reduce a person’s risk of all-cause mortality, although the reductions were more pronounced in those who managed to double – or even quadruple – those metrics
Achieving aerobic fitness goals each week has been valuable in preventing death from heart disease in particular
Researchers, who published their findings Tuesday in Circulation, collected data from 116,221 adults between 1988 and 2018. Data came from the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study.
Each of the participants filled out a questionnaire about their weekly and daily physical activity. They were then regularly followed up to 15 times to assess their health status or whether they had died at any point during the study period.
Nearly 50,000 participants died at some point during the follow-up period. Those who met the fitness goal of two and a half hours regularly reduced their all-cause mortality rate by 19 percent.
Fitness is particularly valuable against heart disease, as hitting goals could reduce mortality from this condition by 31 percent in particular. Aerobic exercise alone reduced the risk of death from other diseases by 15 percent.
However, those who are particularly interested in extending their lives or avoiding heart disease should take their exercise program even further.
The research team found that those who doubled HHS guidelines for weekly aerobic fitness reduced their risk of death by up to 29 percent.
If a person quadrupled the recommendations – meaning they exercised a full 10 hours each week – they reduced their risk of all-cause mortality by nearly 40 percent.
However, hitting the 10 hour mark is an ambitious goal as it would require nearly 90 minutes of exercise every day.
In America, even getting to the baseline of 150 minutes a week — about 20 minutes a day — has become a challenge for many.
A report released Tuesday by the CDC found that just 46.9 percent of American adults reached this marker.
Men have been found to be the most likely to reach this marker. Adults aged 18 to 34 of both sexes were the most likely to achieve the training goals.
The CDC survey found that only 24% of American adults meet the weekly exercise recommendations and only about half meet either requirement
For both men and women, 18- to 34-year-olds were the most likely to meet exercise recommendations — with fitness rates decreasing in older age groups
The CDC survey also included HHS strength exercise markers, which recommend a person engage in activities that work muscles all over the body on at least two days per week.
Combined, only 24 percent of adults achieved both goals.
White men and women were the most likely to meet training goals compared to other races — although the gap between white, Asian and black men was very small — all falling by just about 30 percent.
The survey found that only 23.5 percent of Hispanic men hit their weekly workout goals.
The racial divide was much more pronounced among women. While 24.3 percent of white women hit specific marks, 18 percent or fewer of black, Hispanic, or Asian women did.
Income also played a large role, with those with household incomes twice the federal poverty line twice as likely to achieve goals as those below the line.
