An Easier Way to Exercise

• Getting more activity is good for your overall health and longevity, including your memory and mental acuity.
• You don’t have to do traditional exercise in order to reap these benefits.
• Sneaking more natural movement into your everyday life is one of the best things you can do for your physical and mental health.

“Our bodies do not care whether we call activity ‘exercise’ or not, as long as it is activity of value,” says Scott Lear, professor of health sciences, Simon Fraser University, Canada.

The message about how important is to get regular exercise is hard to miss these days. There’s ample research-backed evidence that staying active is good for your heart, your brain, your waistline — and that it may even help lower risk of diseases such as certain cancers, diabetes and Alzheimer’s. And yet, according to statistics from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, only half of adults in the United States meet the current guidelines that call for getting at least 30 minutes of exercise at least five days a week.

Do you really have to exercise?

The word “exercise” conjures up some pretty specific ideas. Chances are, when you think about trying to get 30 minutes of exercise, you imagine something like a half hour on a stationary bike at the gym or 30 minutes of heart-rate-raising walking, running or swimming. But what if you could just do something enjoyable — or that you needed to do anyway as part of your life or job — and still reap the health benefits? That’s where the idea of mindless movement comes in.

“Our bodies do not care whether we call activity ‘exercise’ or not, as long as it is activity of value,” says Scott Lear, professor of health sciences at Simon Fraser University in Canada. Lear authored a September 2017 study published in The Lancet that looked at physical activity and risk of mortality and heart disease in more than 130,000 people between the ages of 35 and 70. “In our study, participating in nonrecreational activity was equally beneficial to recreational activity.” That meant that participants whose activity mostly involved things like walking as part of their commute, cleaning or having an active job reduced their risk of death by just as much as those who religiously hit the gym.

In a study published in the February 2014 issue of the British Journal of Sports Medicine, researchers in Stockholm followed 4,000 Swedes in their 60s for 12 years and found that those who didn’t usually exercise but were active in other ways — gardening, picking mushrooms and berries, and fixing things around the house — cut their risk of heart attack and stroke by 27 percent and prolonged their lives by about 30 percent.

Some of the world's healthiest people don't exercise

If you think of exercise purely in terms of hours at the gym miles logged on the treadmill or steps counted on your fitness tracker, then you might be surprised to know that populations of people who’ve lived the longest, and remained physically and mentally healthy, have never done that sort of exercise. But they are definitely not couch potatoes. In fact, these healthy, mentally astute seniors are constantly on the move. They walk, they dance, and they garden, cook, clean and climb stairs.

“Their houses are not full of the mechanical conveniences that have engineered movement out of our lives — they still do housework, cook from scratch, and do yard work and gardening with manual tools,” says Dan Buettner, author of The Blue Zones of Happiness. Buettner’s research has focused on pockets he calls “blue zones,” or places with the highest numbers of healthy centenarians, and he found them in remote parts of Greece, Italy and Central America. “We’ve calculated that these people are mindlessly nudged into movement every 20 minutes or so.” But you don’t have to leave all your modern convenience behind just to live a healthier life.

Adding more mindless movement to your life

While you don’t have to move far away, you might want to rediscover some activities you used to enjoy — or try some new ones. Want pizza for dinner? Make, knead and roll your own dough instead of calling for delivery. Need to run a few errands downtown? Park in one spot and then walk to all of your various destinations. Love fresh flowers or vegetables? Dig up a patch of dirt and try growing your own — the weeding and watering will help keep you moving. “The key is to find what’s enjoyable to you,” says Howard Friedman, professor at the University of California, Riverside and coauthor of The Longevity Project. “Because anything that decreases time spent sitting is going to be beneficial.”

In Friedman’s research, being active in middle age was one of the biggest predictors of longevity. And even though his team didn’t look specifically at the connection between activity and cognitive decline, “we did see that good outcomes tend to cluster together,” he says. “In other words, those who stayed healthy and lived longest also tended to maintain their cognitive health.”

The message is clear: Stop stressing about getting more exercise and just start moving more. “In our study, people were able to do more activity if it was nonrecreational,” Lear says. “Meaning that if you just fit activity into your life, you will probably end up doing more than if you just go to the gym.”