From increasing longevity to reducing feelings of anxiety and depression, the benefits of moving your body are well-documented. But finding the time (and energy) to fit regular exercise into your routine can be challenging.

According to new research though, you don’t need to spend hours lifting weights or running around your local park to reap some of the benefits of exercise. The study, published in The Lancet Public Health earlier this week, found that doing as little as 60 seconds of exercise a day could reduce your risk of a whole bunch of issues including heart attack, stroke, heart failure and other “major adverse cardiac events”.

During the study (based on the data of over 25,000 participants sourced from the UK Biobank), researchers measured bouts of movement using smartwatch-like technology and defined exercise as periods when daily activities (such as gardening, cleaning or walking to the store) were carried out with extra effort for a short period of time. That might mean picking up your pace for a bit while walking to the shop or scrubbing your plates extra hard while washing up.

By measuring the activity of participants over the course of one week, and then following up with them years later, the researchers were able to show that those who regularly completed short periods of exertion lowered their risk of heart attack and stroke by 29-44%.

In fact, the study revealed that bursts of activity even less than one minute could lower the risk of cardiac events, as long as 15% or more of that time was vigorous activity.  

Of course, it’s worth noting that just doing a couple of short bursts of activity every day isn’t really enough. The NHS recommends doing at least 150 minutes of moderate intensity activity or 75 minutes of vigorous intensity activity every week for those aged 19-64. 

But this study is proof that even the smallest changes can make a difference to our health; you don’t have to do much to begin reaping the benefits.

This isn’t the first study to show that even small periods of movement could have a big impact on our overall health. Walking, in particular, has been found to offer plenty of benefits even in small doses: earlier this year, a study out of the University of Cambridge found that just 11 minutes of brisk walking a day could be enough to prevent early death and disease.  

And in 2022, a study of more than 400,000 UK adults found that as little as 10 minutes of brisk walking a day was associated with having longer telomeres – a part of your chromosomes associated with aging. That equates to people having a biological age a whopping 16 years younger than their true age by the time they reached middle age. 

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