According to Australian scientists, women could easily reduce their cardiovascular risk. Just one to four minutes of vigorous physical activity a few times a day reduces the frequency of heart attacks and other acute heart problems by half.
The classic recommendations for physical activity to reduce mortality from all causes and especially from cardiovascular disease are clear and still apply: 150 to 300 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous exercise (e.g. running, etc.) per week.
But many people find it difficult to integrate this into their daily lives – as a result, ‘New Year’s resolutions’ often go unrealized.
Short ‘sprints’ in everyday life already help
Another concept also promises help, statistically significant, at least in women: vigorous intermittent physical activity in daily life (VILPA). These are, for example, short, intensive physical activities that last one to two minutes three times a day. What this means: walking up the stairs quickly, jumping while waiting for the dishes from the microwave to heat up, taking a quick break with a quick walk around the block, doing a little skipping rope in front of the TV.
- Emmanuel Stamatakis from the University of Sydney in Australia and British experts have now published a study on this in the “British Journal of Sports Medicine”. The participants came from the UK Biobank and wore an accelerometer on their wrist for seven days between 2013 and 2015, which recorded their physical activity.
- The scientists included 22,368 people who said they did not exercise in their spare time and took a maximum of one walk per week. The comparison group consisted of 58,684 people who exercised recreationally and went for a walk more than once a week.
- The results were striking. When comparing VILPA episodes and the frequency of heart attacks, strokes or heart failure, there were significant differences over an observation period of 7.9 years. “In women, daily VILPA duration showed a nearly linear dose-response relationship for all major cardiovascular events and separately for myocardial infarction and heart failure. However, in men the dose-response curves were less clear,” the medical journal wrote.
The connection for men is not so clear
In women, there was a 45 percent reduction in the frequency of cardiac events with an average total exercise duration of just 3.4 minutes compared to no VILPA sessions. The risk of heart failure even fell by two-thirds and the risk of a heart attack by half.
Shorter VILPA sessions also had an effect: “The finding that even small daily doses of vigorous physical activity are associated with a reduction in cardiovascular events and mortality is particularly encouraging for people who do not engage in structured exercise,” says Yasina Somani of the University of Leeds .
Source: Krone
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