• Posted December 4, 2024

Even Minutes-Long Exercise 'Bursts' Can Help Women's Hearts

Take the stairs. Tote heavy shopping bags. Walk up that hill. Play tag with a kid or a pet.

Weaving these tiny bursts of vigorous physical activity into everyday life can halve a woman’s risk of a heart attack, a new study shows.

An average of four daily minutes of this sort of activity appears to protect the heart health of women who don’t otherwise exercise, researchers reported Dec. 3 in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

“We found that a minimum of 1.5 minutes to an average of four minutes of daily vigorous physical activity, completed in short bursts lasting up to one minute, were associated with improved cardiovascular health outcomes in middle-aged women who do no structured exercise,” said lead researcher Emmanuel Stamatakis, a professor of physical activity, lifestyle and population health at the University of Sydney in Australia.

Specifically, women were 51% less likely to have a heart attack and 67% less likely to develop heart failure if they engaged in these short bursts of activity, compared to women who were completely sedentary, researchers found.

“Making short bursts of vigorous physical activity a lifestyle habit could be a promising option for women who are not keen on structured exercise or are unable to do it for any reason,” Stamatakis said in a university news release.

For the study, researchers analyzed data on nearly 22,400 adults ages 40 to 79, 58% of whom were women, participating in the long-term U.K. Biobank health research project.

All these participants said they did not engage in regular structured exercise, but they wore physical activity trackers for a week so researchers could gauge the bits of exercise they might get in their regular daily lives.

Results showed the more these tiny bursts of activity stacked up in a woman’s life, the lower her risk of a major heart-related health emergency.

Women who got an average 3.4 minutes daily were 45% less likely to experience any type of heart health problem, such as heart attack, stroke and heart failure, researchers found.

Even a minimum of 1.2 to 1.5 minutes a day was associated with a 33% lower risk of heart attack and 40% lower risk of heart failure.

However, men didn’t get the same benefit from short bursts of activity. Men who averaged 5.6 minutes daily were only 16% less likely to experience heart-related health problems, and a minimum of 2.3 minutes produced just an 11% reduction in risk.

More research is needed to understand why these short bursts of activity make such a difference in heart health for women, Stamatakis said.

“Importantly, the beneficial associations we observed were in women who committed to short bursts of [physical activity] almost daily,” Stamatakis said. “This highlights the importance of habit formation, which is not always easy.”

These short daily bursts of activity “should not be seen as a quick fix—there are no magic bullets for health,” Stamatakis added. “But our results show that even a little bit higher intensity activity can help and might be just the thing to help people develop a regular physical activity -- or even exercise -- habit.”

More information

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has more about the benefits of physical activity.

SOURCE: University of Sydney, news release, Dec. 3, 2024