Even the “robustness” of exercise matters for promoting longevity. For example, exercise intensity, even when not prolonged, can help reduce the risk of at least eight chronic diseases. This is what a recent study in the European Heart Journal suggests.
The Baseline Data
Although it is known that vigorous physical activity yields greater health benefits per unit of time than moderate activity, the spectrum of advantages across different chronic diseases and the relative importance of intensity versus total activity volume remain unclear.
To this end, the study examined the associations between the percentage of vigorous physical activity relative to the total volume of physical activity and the incidence of various chronic diseases in a sample of over 96,400 participants, with a mean age of 61.9 years, of whom 56.3% were women, with device-measured data (wrist-worn accelerometers) and 375,730 participants, average age 56.2 years, 52.2% women, based on self-reported physical activity data (IPAQ).
Participants were all part of the UK Biobank. The study primarily aimed to evaluate the impact on eight chronic diseases: major adverse cardiovascular events, atrial fibrillation, type 2 diabetes, immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, liver steatosis associated with metabolic dysfunction, chronic respiratory diseases, chronic kidney disease, and dementia, as well as all-cause mortality. Proportional hazards Cox models were used to estimate adjusted hazard ratios and 95% confidence intervals. In addition, the objective was to define the probabilities of developing or dying from these eight conditions over the following seven years.
The Results
The study found that people who allocated a larger share of their total physical activity to vigorous activities had a significantly lower risk of developing all diseases. Specifically, in the device-measured group, there were inverse non-linear dose–response relationships between the percentage of vigorous physical activity and all outcomes (all P < 0.001), and these patterns remained consistent across different total activity-volume bands. In models adjusted for total physical activity volume, participants with >4% vigorous activity had a 29%–61% lower risk of these outcomes compared with those with 0% vigorous activity.
Joint analyses and population-attributable fractions revealed disease-specific patterns: immune-mediated inflammatory diseases showed a strong dependence on intensity with minimal contribution from activity volume (20.3% for intensity vs 1.0% for volume), whereas major adverse cardiovascular events (17.8% vs 6.0%), atrial fibrillation (16.2% vs 5.0%), chronic cardiovascular diseases (21.4% vs 5.6%), and dementia (32.3% vs 8.1%) demonstrated a predominance of intensity with only a modest contribution from activity volume, and type 2 diabetes (26.6% vs 17.7%), heart-failure–associated liver diseases (22.1% vs 16.6%), chronic kidney disease (23.0% vs 15.3%) and all-cause mortality (31.4% vs 14.2%) showed more balanced contributions from both intensity and volume.
In essence, compared with those who did not engage in any vigorous activity, for example, those with the highest share of vigorous activity had about a 63% lower risk of developing dementia, about a 60% lower risk of type 2 diabetes, and about a 46% lower risk of death. These benefits of vigorous activity persisted even with modest durations. It also emerged that a higher proportion of vigorous physical activity was more important for some diseases than for others: for inflammatory conditions such as arthritis and psoriasis, intensity was almost the only determinant of risk reduction. For others, like diabetes and chronic liver diseases, both the amount and the intensity of physical activity were important.
In conclusion, it was observed that a higher percentage of vigorous-intensity physical activity, independent of total activity volume, is inversely associated with eight major chronic diseases and all-cause mortality. Intensity consistently demonstrated greater preventive potential than total physical activity volume. These findings support, whenever possible, prioritizing high-intensity activities in clinical and public health interventions aimed at preventing non-communicable diseases.
What this means is that making part of your physical activity more intense can bring meaningful benefits, for example by adding short bursts of high effort into daily life that leave you slightly out of breath, such as climbing stairs quickly, briskly walking between errands, or actively playing with children, which can truly make a difference for longevity and health. Over time, even as little as 15–20 minutes per week of this kind of effort, i.e., a few minutes a day, has been associated in the study with significant health benefits.
Source
Wei J, Shen M, Li S et al. Volume vs intensity of physical activity and risk of cardiovascular and non-cardiovascular chronic diseases. European Heart Journal, 2026, 29:ehag168. Doi: 10.1093/eurheartj/ehag168
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