02/04/2026
👀👀 SEE! It's not just us saying 'keep moving, stay healthy' - science backs it as well!
New study on physical activity and longevity. A few thoughts worth sharing.
https://bmjmedicine.bmj.com/content/5/1/e001513
A large BMJ Medicine paper followed tens of thousands of adults for decades to examine the types and variety of physical activity and their association with the risk of death.
The clear wins
• Being physically active is associated with lower mortality across most activity types.
• Doing a variety of activities seems to add benefit, even after accounting for total activity.
• Walking shows the most consistent and robust relationship with lower risk across outcomes. Simple, accessible, and powerful.
Where we should slow down and think
Some of the dose–response curves look strange. Cycling is a good example, where the curve can look W-shaped: a little helps, some harms, then a lot helps again. That pattern makes little biological sense and is far more likely due to noisy data at higher activity levels and overfitting flexible curves.
When most of the confidence interval sits below 1.0, it is hard to argue that there is real harm. These shapes should be questioned, especially when they contradict better-powered studies showing broadly monotonic benefits of physical activity.
Quick explainer
A MET is a unit of energy cost relative to resting.
About 5 MET-hours per week is roughly 40–45 minutes of easy cycling, or about 75 minutes of brisk walking.
Bottom line
Move more. Walk often. Mix your activities. The BIG picture is the reduction in risk for multiple diseases… if that were a drug, we’d be falling over ourselves to take it!
And be cautious about over-interpreting squiggly curves from observational data when common sense, biology, and stronger evidence point in the same direction.
Feel free to share if this helps keep the conversation grounded in evidence.
