Adding just a few minutes of exercise per day could impact a person’s life expectancy, a new study has found.

Combined with an extra 24 minutes of sleep and small improvements to diet quality, those daily changes could add up to several additional years of life. 

The research is one of two studies published this week that examine how small adjustments to day-to-day movement, sleep and diet are associated with substantial health improvements.

Sleep, physical activity and diet study

The study, published in eClinicalMedicine, followed up a group of people eight years after they signed up for UK Biobank, a massive project that collected data on demographics, health and lifestyle in the early 2000s.

The team of researchers, led by Nicholas Koemel of the University of Sydney, fitted 59,078 people with trackers to monitor their exercise and sleep patterns for a week.

They also rated the participants’ self-reported diet at the time they signed up for UK Biobank to come up with a score out of 100.

According to the researchers, the study is the first of its kind to investigate the minimum combined doses of device-measured sleep and physical activity, alongside a comprehensive dietary score. 

“We were aiming to look at the interconnection between sleep, physical activity, and diet; and our lifespan — which is the number of years that we live — and our healthspan, that’s essentially the number of years we live free from chronic disease,” Dr Koemel said.

The research found that small improvements in all three areas made gains in both lifespan and healthspan.

The study found that improvement of life expectancy by one year when participants added:

• just five extra minutes of sleep per day,  plus
• just under two minutes per day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, and 
• an extra half serving of vegetables.

“One of the core findings from our study was that realistic improvements, these modest tiny tweaks across multiple behaviours, the sleep, physical activity, and diet, were able to create meaningful improvements in our lifespan and healthspan,” Dr Koemel said. 

While these baby steps could help, overall the  study found that the “optimal combination” of the three categories correlated with an additional nine years of life expectancy was:

• seven to eight hours of sleep, 
• just over 40 minutes of moderate exercise per day, 
• and a healthy diet.

Moira Junge, an adjunct clinical professor and health psychologist at Monash University, praised the studies and said looking at the combination of sleep, exercise and diet over the long term is crucial in longevity research.

“We absolutely need to put it together, and research like this is proof that even small changes can make a really big difference to your health and wellbeing,” Dr Junge said.

Cutting sitting by half hour helps with life expectancy

The second study, published in The Lancet, examined participants who had low activity levels and spent hours sitting throughout the day. 

Data from more than 135,000 adults across Norway, Sweden and the United States, combined with data from the UK Biobank examined the impact of daily physical activity and reductions in sedentary behaviours on mortality. 

The researchers found a nine per cent reduction in mortality risk when those sitting for eight or more hours a day reduced their sitting time by 30 minutes. 

Sedentary behaviour has previously been linked to higher rates of chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, colon cancer and cardiovascular diseases, prompting some claims that “sitting is the new smoking”.

The study also found that increasing physical activity by just five minutes a day could have a significant health impact, especially for minimally active people. 

Increasing from one minute to six minutes of exercise per day was associated with an approximately 30 per cent reduction in mortality risk. Those who increased activity from one minute to 11 minutes per day saw an approximate 42 per cent reduction in mortality risk.

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In 2022, a reported four in 10 Australian adults (aged 18–64) were insufficiently physically active: not meeting the recommended 150–300 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity across five or more days per week. 

“In reality, there’s always going to be people who don’t meet the guidelines,” said Melody Ding, a professor of public health at University of Sydney who co-led the study.

“It tells us in terms of the benefits of physical activity, that we don’t need to get everybody to do so much. This micro-dosing concept, especially for those who are inactive, could make a huge difference in terms of health outcomes,” she said.

Something better than nothing

Dr Junge hoped the study findings could help people feel positive health outcomes are achievable. 

“I think that when people can feel like they’ve got mastery over something then they’re more likely to change their behaviour and more likely to have motivation to change. Health is a confidence game,” she said. 

Lauren Ball, a professor of community health and wellbeing at University of Queensland, said the two new studies reconfirm the importance of diet, physical activity and sleep for overall health and wellbeing. 

“The notion that modest increases in physical activity is beneficial is also supported by other studies, suggesting that doing something is always better than nothing,” she said. 

“The results also support behaviour change theories that suggest that improving one aspect of health behaviour, such as eating well, may increase motivation or self-efficacy for other health behaviours, such as being physically active. 

‘Not a silver bullet’

While these numbers might be inspiring for some, Dr Koemel said they were not a “silver bullet”.

“It’s something that’s easy to accidentally take away from this; that maybe we only need to do one minute of exercise, and that’s not the case,” he said. 

“We still have physical guidelines, and those are there for a reason. This is really about helping us go that extra step, and ask what we would need to do to take the first step in the right direction.” 

The studies found that mortality improvements were most significant in participants who were inactive.

But Dr Ding said there was a “saturation point”.

“For example, in this study our data has shown that for those who are already doing 30 or 40 minutes per day; the active people who are meeting the guidelines, adding another five minutes, you don’t really see visible change.”

Despite this, Dr Koemel said looking at small daily changes across sedentary behaviours, sleep, diet and physical activity could have positive impacts more widely.

“We want to try to create opportunities where everybody can make change. The idea that we need to make these massive overhauls; wake up and and run a marathon or go to the gym every day of the week, that might not necessarily be the best starting place,” he said.