A Few Minutes of Vigorous Exercise May Slash Risk of 8 Diseases, Study Says

How to safely rev up your workouts

Kristen Fischer,

AARP

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Published April 30, 2026

A woman practices boxing in a park on a sunny day.

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Key takeaways

Even brief bursts of vigorous effort during workouts are linked to lower risks for eight major diseases.
The share of time spent exercising vigorously matters more than total workout length.
Small, sustainable tweaks can safely raise intensity without overhauling your routine.

A few minutes of heart-pumping physical activity a day could lower your risk for eight major diseases, a new study finds. In fact, completing short bursts of vigorous activity may matter more than how long you work out when it comes to cutting disease risk, according to a March 29 study in the European Heart Journal.

Although exercising at a moderate intensity is still beneficial, adding just a few minutes of vigorous exercise to your workouts yields striking results. If you exercise for 30 minutes a day at a moderate level and two minutes of that workout are vigorous, increasing to two and a half minutes to start (and then maybe working up to three minutes) will do more to reduce your disease risk than if you stayed at the moderate level, says Michael Bruneau Jr., an associate teaching professor and director of exercise science at Drexel University.

“Vigorous physical activity appears to trigger specific responses in the body that lower-intensity activity cannot fully replicate,” Minxue Shen, a professor at the Xiangya School of Public Health at China’s Central South University and one of the study's authors, said in a statement.

Exploring physical activity

Vigorous activity is defined as reaching 70 to 85 percent of your maximum heart rate, while moderate exercise is 50 to about 70 percent of your maximum heart rate, according to the American Heart Association.

When you can talk but not sing, that’s a moderate level; when you’re working so hard you can speak but not in full sentences, that is a vigorous level, says Anthony Wall, a personal trainer and senior director of global business development and professional education at the American Council on Exercise.

Physical activity guidelines suggest getting at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity a week or at least 75 minutes of vigorous exercise.

In 2024, 47 percent of adults met those guidelines. Men were more likely to adhere, according to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Among those sticking to the recommendation, 45 percent were 50 to 64 years old and 38 percent were over 65.

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This study built on previous research that has found vigorous activity is linked to longevity. A 2022 report in Circulation found that people who exceeded the physical activity recommendations by two to four times — getting 150 to 299 minutes of vigorous activity per week — had a 2 to 4 percent lower mortality risk than those who met the guidelines.

Those who exercised moderately 300 to 599 minutes weekly had a 3 to 13 percent lower risk than those who met the guidelines. Neither intensity was better than the other in older adults, compared with younger ones, the authors wrote.

Why the bonus benefits? During vigorous physical activity, your heart pumps more efficiently, your blood vessels become more flexible, and you become more efficient at using oxygen, Shen said.

Staying active to lower disease risk

In Shen’s study, the team examined data about 96,000 participants with an average age of 62 who wore wrist monitors for seven days. They also looked at data from more than 375,000 participants who were 56 years old on average and self-reported their activity.

Researchers noted how much activity was vigorous and calculated the risk of those participants developing diseases or dying over the next approximately nine years.

Diseases measured included major adverse cardiovascular events (like heart attacks), type 2 diabetes, chronic kidney disease, atrial fibrillation (AFib), metabolic dysfunction-associated steatotic liver disease (MASLD), immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (like Crohn’s disease), chronic respiratory diseases and dementia. The study also tracked all-cause mortality.

Those who exercised vigorously the most had a significantly lower risk of disease than those who did not exercise vigorously at all. The results included:

63 percent lower risk for dementia
60 percent lower risk for type 2 diabetes
48 percent lower risk for MASLD
39 percent lower risk of an immune disease
44 percent lower risk for a chronic respiratory disease
41 percent lower risk for chronic kidney disease
46 percent lower risk for death
31 percent lower risk for a major adverse cardiovascular event
29 percent lower for AFib

Revving up your workouts

While it’s good to increase intensity, you should do it slowly. If you don’t yet exercise, talk to your doctor before you begin, Bruneau says. Focus on starting to move instead of pushing to your maximum level right away, he adds.

Staying physically active on a regular basis is most important, Bruneau says. To bolster your intensity, make small tweaks to what you’re already doing successfully, he says. You can build your cardio fitness mostly through moderate activity, then boost it in small increments, he adds.

Find a more challenging way to do an exercise you already do, suggests Amal Wanigatunga, an assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

If you walk, pick up the pace safely, even by just a bit. “Doing anything more than your routine can help your health, so it could be a few sustained seconds,” Wanigatunga says. Over time, moving faster will become more familiar and comfortable, and it will be easier to put short, vigorous bursts into your routine, he says.

Upping the intensity should be less about meeting an exact target and more of an “effort-based intensity,” Bruneau says. That is, just putting more effort in is making your workout more vigorous than it was, he explains.

Do what works for you and do it slowly, Bruneau says. Think sustainability, making sure you can stick with changes and be safe raising intensity, he adds.

6 simple ways to add intensity

A few ways to add more oomph to existing exercise:

1. If you walk on a treadmill, raise the incline slightly.

2. Add climbing stairs to your day.

3. Add one or two additional moves to the exercises you already do.

4. Lift dumbbells? Slow down the movement to create more tension. When that gets easier, add more reps.

5. After completing your workout, take a break instead of stopping. Then do another exercise or two.

6. Increase the resistance by a unit on your stationary bike, pedal quicker — or do both.

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The key takeaways were created with the assistance of generative AI. An AARP editor reviewed and refined the content for accuracy and clarity.

Kristen Fischer is a contributing writer at AARP based at the Jersey Shore. She has also written for Health, WebMD, and McKnights and is the author of Zoo Zen: A Yoga Story for Kids.

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