You probably go jogging because it makes you less fat and it is less humiliating than being yelled at through a 60-minute spinning class. But according to a new examination of the Copenhagen City Heart study, jogging less than two hours per week can add years to your life.
The Copenhagen City Heart study started in 1976, around the time that the jogging boom happened, and followed 20,000 men and women, aged 20 to 98. Of the group, there were 1116 male joggers and 768 female joggers. When their mortality rates were compared with the main group, the men lived 6.2 years longer than non-joggers, and women 5.6 years longer. Even crazier? The amount of exercise needed to drastically increase your lifespan isn’t much at all. Just one to two and a half hours per week, split over two or three sessions.
Sure, folks who at least make the effort to run a little bit every week might also be taking care of themselves in other ways. The lesson? Stop being so lazy. Or if you’re already pretty active, you are probably going to live to be older than your lazy friends. Really, though, rippling abdominals aside, five or six years tacked on to the end of your life for a few hours’ worth of effort a week is a pretty good deal. [EurekAlert via Twitter]
Image: Shutterstock/Kurhan