Thirty minutes per week of this activity lowers the risk of early death, diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.
People who do muscle strengthening activities for 30 to 60 minutes per week, are at a 10 to 20 percent lower risk of diabetes, cardiovascular disease, cancer, and early death.
Muscles, or more precisely, skeletal muscles are important for energy production, body movement, and generally the quality of human life.
Adults’ skeletal muscle health greatly benefits from regular muscle strengthening activities such as heavy gardening, digging and shovelling, cycling, hill walking, resistance band exercises, lunges, sit-ups, push-ups, squats, and lifting weights.
Past studies have found that muscle strengthening exercises are associated with longevity, but the optimal dose was unknown.
For this reason, a research team analysed data from sixteen studies on associations between muscle strengthening activities and health outcomes in adults.
They found that muscle strengthening activities reduced diabetes, lung cancer, heart disease, stroke, and death up to 17 percent.
People who performed muscle strengthening activities for 30 to 60 minutes per week benefited most as the risk of CVD, cancer and all causes of death was reduced up to 20 percent.
The risk of diabetes remarkably went down with 60 minutes muscle strengthening once-a-week activities were carried out.
However, combination of muscle strengthening and aerobic exercises seem to offer maximum risk reduction.
These two activities together reduced risk of death for CVD by 46 percent, all-causes by 40 percent, and cancer by 28 percent.
The authors concluded:
“The combination of muscle strengthening and aerobic activities may provide a greater benefit for reducing all-cause, [cardiovascular disease], and total cancer mortality.
Given that the available data are limited, further studies—such as studies focusing on a more diverse population—are needed to increase the certainty of the evidence.”
The study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine (Momma et al., 2022).
