Five minutes of sports a day will give you extra years of life

The Norwegian team focused on the problem of sedentary lifestyle. Doctors have estimated that passivity causes almost 9% of deaths worldwide, but correcting the situation is easier than it seems. According to their calculations, it is enough to reduce the time spent sitting in an armchair by only 30 minutes a day for the body to say “thank you.”

Even more impressive figures relate to physical activity. Experts have found that adding just five minutes of moderate- to high-intensity activity per day can prevent a significant proportion of premature deaths. It’s not about running a marathon, it’s about walking fast or climbing stairs. If the laziest people started spending at least five minutes moving, it would save 6% of lives, and if everyone else joined in, the number of lives saved would rise to 10%.

Australian analysts went further and examined the complex effects of sleep, nutrition, and movement. They came up with an interesting formula for minimal investment. To live one year longer, you don’t need to radically change your destiny. It is enough to add 5 minutes to a night’s sleep, only 1.9 minutes to active movements, and slightly improve the quality of food (by about 5 points on the scale of usefulness).

These ridiculous numbers add up in real time. If a person is willing to make a little more effort, the reward increases many times. An increase in sleep by 24 minutes, activity by 4 minutes and a more serious revision of the diet (more vegetables, less sugar) will give you four years of healthy old age without diseases.

Of course, the maximum effect is achieved with the optimal mode. Those lucky people who sleep from 7 to 8 hours, actively move for more than 40 minutes a day and monitor the quality of food benefit from nature for an average of 9.35 years of life.

This is the only recent study that so clearly translates an abstract healthy lifestyle into specific minutes and years. The main message of the doctors is simple: you don’t have to wait for Monday to start a new life. It is enough to go to bed five minutes earlier today and walk to the far bus stop — this will already be a contribution to your future.