“Exercise Guidelines: How Following Them Can Reduce Your Risk of Flu and Pneumonia”

About the episode

Try to exercise moderately intensively for a total of 2.5 hours per week, says the Dutch exercise guideline. And do strength training twice a week. Exercise is important for our health, both mentally and physically, as research has long shown. Now there also seems to be evidence that exercise influences the chance of dying from flu or pneumonia.

This study looked at data from nearly 580,000 adults in the US who participated in the National Health Interview Survey between 1998 and 2018.

During that 20-year period, participants were asked to record how often they exercised for more than 10 minutes in their spare time and how intensively they did it. Participants were asked about both cardio and strength training. They saw that half of the respondents did not meet the weekly guidelines. A third did no cardio and more than three-quarters reported less than two strength training sessions per week.

Interesting in itself, but when they compared this to data on mortality from flu or pneumonia, they saw something else: the people who followed both the cardio and strength training advice were almost 50 percent less likely to die from flu or pneumonia.

Just meeting the cardio goal also reduced the risk. If people did that for 10 to 150 minutes a week, which is even less than the recommended amount, the risk already went down by 21 percent. And the more minutes of cardio, the further that risk went down. At least: up to 600 minutes (i.e. 10 hours) per week. Then the risk does not decrease any further.

As far as strength training is concerned, they also saw something interesting: with 7 sessions or more per week, the risk of dying from flu or pneumonia actually increased. So too much is not good either, it seems.

Of course, this is an observational study. Which limits the implications. Even though they corrected for all kinds of other factors that could influence that risk of death and it is a large group: the data is still filled in by the participants themselves and it is difficult to correct for some things. Still, I would say: a little extra just to be sure, can’t hurt for most people. But remember: too much is not good either.

Read more about the research here: Aerobic (“cardio”) exercise linked to significantly lower risk of flu or pneumonia death.