Activate: Friends

In this week's Rundown, active friends help couch potatoes get moving, two-minute bursts of exercise boost longevity, and crossword puzzles show some promise for reducing mild cognitive decline.

The Rundown

Activate: Friends. A new model simulates how social interactions could influence our exercise habits and the results suggest that if you want to be less sedentary, find a more active friend.

A research team from Kean University in Union, New Jersey built a mathematical model that reproduces how social interactions can affect a population’s exercise trends over time using data from the U.S. Military Academy.

The model showed that with no social interactions, populations experienced a long-term decrease in physically active people, and sedentary behavior dominated.

When the simulations included social interaction between sedentary and moderately active people, sedentary populations grew more active over time.

In simulations where moderately active people became more sedentary over time, overall physical activity dropped.

The simulations were not validated with real-world data but the team believes they provide new insights because traditional exercise interventions focus on getting inactive people to exercise.

Alternatively, this model suggests that encouraging moderately active people to both maintain their activity and increase their interactions with people who don’t exercise could encourage higher levels of overall physical activity in the population.

Two-Minutes to Longevity. Some is better than none when it comes to the impact of exercise on our health and studies continue to stress the value of even short bursts of physical activity. In this newsletter, you’ve read about “activity snacks” that can help maintain muscle mass and the significant strength gains found in doing six dumbbell curls a day.

The latest research in the area of fitness for the time-poor looks at how a series of two-minute bursts of high-intensity exercise throughout the week may help us live longer.

Published across two papers, the new studies used the UK Biobank database and wrist-worn activity tracker data to assess over 150,000 adults between the ages of 40-69.

The first study involved more than 70,000 healthy adults. It analyzed the relationship between volume and frequency of intense activity, death from all causes and death from cardiovascular disease and cancer.

The researchers found that even small amounts of vigorous activity had an impact.

With 15 minutes of exercise per week, risk of an early death dropped by 18%. With 53 minutes of activity per week risk of death from any cause dropped by 36%.

The analysis showed that accumulating that time in two-minute bursts of exercise spread across the day also had an effect. Four quick sessions of vigorous activity each day was linked to a 27% lower risk of death while 10 short bursts a week was linked to a 16% lower risk of cardiovascular disease and a 17% lower risk of cancer.

The second study looked at the relationship between the volume and intensity of exercise and the risk of cardiovascular disease. The researchers found that for the same volume of exercise, raising the intensity was linked to reduced risk.

For example, when moderate to vigorous activity made up 20% rather than 10% of exercise, the rate of cardiovascular disease risk was 14% lower.

Crossword Cognition. Results from a new clinical trial have shown that playing crossword games may be more effective at slowing age-related cognitive decline than video games designed to improve memory.

A team of researchers from Columbia University and Duke University recruited over 100 people aged around 70 with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and split them into a cognitive video game group and a crossword group.

For 12 weeks, the participants played four 30-minute game sessions per week. After that, they played a week of gaming sessions every few months for the next 18 months.

After 78 weeks, cognitive scores for the crossword group had slightly improved. The scores for the video game group had gotten slightly worse.

The results seemed to depend on how bad each person’s cognitive decline was at the start of the trial. Older people with more advanced cases showed more improvement from crosswords compared to younger subjects at earlier stages of decline.

The team speculates that people with late MCI may have found the video games too hard and are more familiar with crossword puzzles, which suggests that cognitive-enhancing video games could still be beneficial in the future for a generation more familiar with them.

Replay

This week’s vintage moment in sports culture is brought to you by Michael Phelps’ magic touch. He won the 100-meter butterfly by 0.01 seconds against Serbian swimmer Milorad Cavic at the Beijing Olympics, August 16, 2008. Photo: Heinz Kluetmeier.