Strength training will help you live longer

In contemporary society, the accelerated pace of life implies considerable strain on individuals, who are increasingly aware of the need to take care of their health. Within this framework, one of their main concerns is to maximize longevity in order to enjoy life for as long as possible.

In addition to taking good care of our diet, it is essential to combine a healthy diet with physical exercise. But what is the best way to exercise so that it translates into greater longevity?

Science has the answer: a study published by the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology in September 2024 reveals the importance of effort when exercising over frequency, volume or duration of workouts. To put it simply: weight training is better than previously thought.

The European Journal of Preventive Cardiology study shows that "the distribution of the intensity of accumulated physical activity over the day may be more important for mortality reduction than the amount (volume)." Let's translate that scientific jargon.

Continuing with the study, it is noted that the conclusions obtained "underline the importance of integrating higher intensity physical activity into daily routines to optimize health", emphasizing the health benefits of both, although placing special emphasis on this aspect.

This is why "a higher intensity of physical activity is more closely associated with a lower risk of mortality than the volume of physical activity, particularly for mortality from cardiovascular diseases." (Let us translate this again for mere mortals: more health the more exercise and even better health if that exercise has strength as its central element).

To conduct this study, based on an observational study with data from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES) of the United States from 2011 to 2014, scientists worked with a sample of 7,518 adults over 20 years of age, of which 52% were women.

The research created percentile curves that reflected the levels of physical activity in the adult population of the United States and found that mortality was reduced by looking at both volume and intensity, although especially in the latter case.

Thus, when increasing physical effort during sports practice, doubling, for example, the percentile from 25 to 50 in terms of intensity, they observed how the risk of general mortality was reduced by 37.1% and the risk of cardiovascular mortality by 41%.

In addition, the more times you do this intense physical activity throughout the week, the more benefits you will get to improve your health, improve our aging process by avoiding cardiovascular diseases and extend your life.

At this point another question arises: what should we do to achieve greater intensity in our workouts? Experts point out that the key is to perform exercises that generate a considerable increase in heart rate and breathing, mixing cardio with weights to improve our aerobic capacity, muscular endurance and strength.

A good example of this is an increasingly fashionable discipline, CrossFit, a training method that combines different exercises (push-ups, pulling, weight lifting, running, jumping, etc.) collected from different disciplines that are performed in a certain time and number of repetitions, with the premise of performing them at a high intensity.

The conclusions reached in this study are added to those of other previous studies such as the one published by The British Journal of Sports Medicine in 2022, which already put forward the idea that a lower risk of death was associated with doing aerobic exercises and strength training regularly (between two or three times a week).

Speaking to The New York Times, data scientist and author (among others) of this study, Carver Coleman, noted that switching from a sedentary lifestyle to an exercise program like the one indicated would be comparable to "smoking versus not smoking."

However, that research discussed the difficulties in understanding the link between strength training and longevity, something that experts attributed to the difficulty in studying it as it was something that few people did regularly and that has now been answered with this new study.

Of course, the importance of regular strength training for healthy aging was already clear back then, as Dr. Bruce Moseley, an orthopedic surgeon at Baylor College of Medicine, told The New York Times: "If you have good muscle strength, you'll function at a much higher level and for longer."

The World Health Organization (WHO) highlights the importance of moderate exercise to maintain good health, but little by little, and thanks to these studies, we already know the importance of working by combining strength with cardiovascular exercises, something that can give us years of life if, in addition, we work on it regularly and intensely.

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