Mixing Up Your Workouts Could Be the Secret to a Longer Life, Major Study Finds
Doing a variety of different types of exercise each week – rather than sticking to just one activity – is linked to a significantly lower risk of early death, according to one of the largest and longest-running studies on physical activity ever conducted.
Researchers from Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health tracked the weekly exercise habits of more than 110,000 U.S. adults (mostly nurses and health professionals) for up to 30 years. The findings, published in BMJ Medicine, revealed that people who regularly participated in the widest range of physical activities had a 19% lower overall risk of death during the study period compared with those who focused on only one type of exercise.
The benefit of variety held true even after accounting for total exercise volume. In other wor...