Good news for swimmers, tennis players and Zumba dancers: you may be sweating your way to a longer life than other jocks.
Swimming, racquet sports and aerobics were associated with the best odds of staving off death from any cause, as well as from heart disease and stroke, in a new study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.
But surprisingly, fitness favorites such as running/jogging and football/rugby didn’t share a similar significantly reduced risk.
Researchers analyzed data from 11 national health surveys for England and Scotland that were taken between 1994 and 2008. The surveyed 80,306 adults were asked what type of physical activity they’d done in the previous four weeks, how much they’d done, and whether it was intense enough to make them breathless and sweaty. The activities included domestic heavy-duty household chores, gardening, and maintenance work; walking; and the six most popular sports, including cycling, swimming, aerobics/gymnastics/dance; running; soccer/rugby; and badminton/tennis/squash.
The survival of each participant, average age 52, was tracked for about nine years. And compared to the people who said they had not broken a sweat doing one of the given physical activities, the risk of death from any cause was cut almost in half for racquet sport players at 47%. And mortality risk was 28% lower for swimmers, 27% lower for aerobics fans and 15% lower for cyclists.
And when it came to heart disease and stroke, racquet sports aced it again with a 56% reduced mortality risk, and swimmers and aerobics fans also saw 41% and 36% less risk, respectively.
“This study reinforces that the best workout has both aerobic exercise and some resistance training, such as swimming, tennis and rowing,” said Dr. Satjit Bhusri, cardiologist at Lenox Hill Hospital. “These are known for both building endurance and also creating strong muscles. You’ve got to have both.”
But what about running? “The likely reason for them not showing reduced mortality in the fully adjusted analysis was that the participants in these sports were younger than their controls and the participants in the other sports to begin with, and we would need another 5-10 years to follow them in order to find the actual mortality rate,” study coauthor Dr. Pekka Oja from the UKK Institute in Finland told the Daily News.
And because this study was observational, no firm conclusions could be drawn about the cause and effect of these findings.
Still, the team concluded that, “these findings demonstrate that participation in specific sports may have significant benefits for public health.” They encouraged health professionals and sports communities to develop and push for more athletic programs to get the public on a healthier track.
