Four types of exercise that help you live longer, according to science, and why running and soccer aren’t among them

Want to live longer? Swim, cycle, pick up a racquet sport or practise aerobics – rather than run or play soccer. That’s the finding of a study published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine that tracked more than 80,000 adults in England and Scotland for an average of nine years.

While any physical activity will have some health benefits, an international research team found that swimming, aerobics and racquet sports (such as badminton, tennis and squash) were associated with significantly reduced risk of death from all causes and particularly from cardiovascular disease, compared to survey respondents who said they had not done any of these sports. Cycling was also linked with a significantly reduced risk of death from all causes but not cardiovascular disease.

The researchers, led by a team from the University of Sydney, reached their conclusions after taking into account potentially influential factors such as age, sex, long-standing illness, frequency of alcohol consumption, psychological distress, body mass index, smoking status, education level, doctor-diagnosed cardiovascular disease and weekly physical activity volume.

For running or soccer, the researchers did find a 43 per cent reduced risk of death from all causes and a 45 per cent reduced risk from cardiovascular disease among runners and joggers when compared with those who didn’t run or jog, but this apparent advantage disappeared when all the potentially influential factors were accounted for.

“Our findings indicate that it’s not only how much and how often, but also what type of exercise you do that seems to make the difference,” says the study’s senior author, associate professor Emmanuel Stamatakis from the Charles Perkins Centre, faculty of health sciences and school of public health at the University of Sydney.