Moving More is Good – But Intensity Matters

Current guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO) recommend that adults engage in at least 150 minutes of moderate physical activity per week, or at least 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity, treating 1 minute of vigorous activity as equivalent to 2 minutes of moderate activity. 

But does this equivalence – historically based on self-reported data – truly reflect the effects on our health? 

A recent study published in Nature Communications challenges this long-standing assumption. The researchers used objective, wearable-device data collected over time to assess how different intensities of movement actually impact mortality and chronic disease risk. 

 The study analysed data from over 70,000 participants, followed on average for 8 years, drawn from the UK Biobank – one of the largest biomedical databases in the world that not only tracks clinical and genetic parameters from more than half a million people in the UK, bat also collects behavioural data, including daily physical activity. Participants’ activity levels were measured using accelerometers, allowing researchers to classify movement into three intensity levels: (i) light activity, (ii) moderate activity and (iii) vigorous activity. 

Successivamente, i ricercatori hanno analizzato l’associazione tra questi tre livelli e i principali indicatori di salute, tra cui: mortalità per tutte le cause, mortalità cardiovascolare, eventi cardiovascolari maggiori, diabete di tipo 2 e mortalità per cancro. 

The researchers then examined how these three levels of activity related to key health outcomes, including all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, major cardiovascular events, type-2 diabetes, and cancer mortality. 

Findings show that vigorous activity is far more effective than moderate activity in reducing the risk of disease and death. Specifically, to achieve the same risk reduction as 1 minute of vigorous activity, on average: 

• 4-5 minutes of moderate activity are needed to reduce overall mortality; 


• up to 8-9 minutes of moderate activity are needed to lower cardiovascular mortality and the risk of type-2 diabetes; 


• more than 50 minutes of light activity are required to achieve modest benefits. 

Thus, the study highlights an important point: not all physical activities carry the same “weight”. The intensity of movement strongly influences cardiometabolic mechanisms, blood sugar control, and inflammatory processes, with direct implications for the prevention of major non-communicable diseases. Another key innovation of this research is the use of objective digital data, which reduces the errors typical of self-reported activity and allows for a more accurate estimate of the real impact of movement on health. 

More broadly, these findings suggest the need to: 

• rethink the equivalences between different activity intensities in global guidelines; 


• place greater emphasis on including brief moments of vigorous activity in daily life; 


• integrate more objective data into health promotion and prevention strategies