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It’s a widely accepted fact that exercise is the key to good health and a long life. However, opinion on which form of exercise is the best to prolong life has been conflicting. Now, a new study suggests that playing tennis, swimming, or doing aerobic exercises are the best ways to live longer.
The study was the result of a combined effort of an international group of scientists, The Guardian reports. One of the co-authors of the study is Charlie Foster from the University of Oxford, and he says that this is the first of its kind in terms of scale.
“It is the first big scale population study to say ‘is participation in sport protective in terms of your long-term mortality?’ The answer is yes, it does appear to be,” Foster says.
So there is certainly enough data to conclude the correlation between exercise and longevity. However, the study also picks out which form of sport is the most protective in terms of mortality.
The study was published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, and it had 80, 306 participants, all of whom were 30 years old or older. The participants were given quizzes, containing questions related to their health. They were also asked what forms of exercise they were participating in. All in all, the scope of the study reached all the way back to 1994 and ended in 2008.
After sifting through mountains of relevant data, including sex, lifestyle, habits, and BMI, it was determined that the type of exercise done had different results in terms of benefits in longevity. For example, cyclists only received a low 15 percent reduction in mortality. On the other hand, racquet sports like tennis reduced risk of death by 56 percent in terms of cardiovascular diseases.
Consequently, aerobic exercises such as dancing or the popular global phenomenon, Zumba reduced cardiovascular risks of death by 36 percent. For the swimmers out there, the reduction rate sat at 41 percent.
