For decades, the main message that medicine has conveyed to us is that physical exercise should be a priority and it has been summarized with one word: move. Accumulating hours of activity per week has been the great objective that many have had; However, a new study has come to turn this around, to give great importance to the type of exercise and how varied the training menu we follow is when we go to the gym.
More and more complete. As we investigate more, the way we exercise is changing, and now a study published at the end of 2026 has suggested that combining different types of exercises reduces the risk of mortality, regardless of whether we do a lot or a little sport in total.
That is why the message we must keep in mind is that, instead of doing many hours of a single exercise, it is worth diversifying a little between different modalities, dedicating a little time to each of them.
How they have done it. To reach this conclusion, the research team used data from two large groups of people to bring together more than 100,000 people who were followed for more than thirty years. In this way, with different questionnaires, the team measured the active time that each of the people to be analyzed had, establishing a minimum threshold of 20 minutes of activity per week to estimate that someone was really doing it and that it was significant.
The objective was to find a correlation between activity levels, the number of these activities and, above all, how they reached adulthood and even when they died in the event that they had not reached the end of the study.
The results. The most striking finding is that the group of people who practiced a greater variety of exercise had 19% less total mortality compared to those who limited themselves to a single repetitive routine. But the most important thing is that this good effect of variety in activity is independent of the total volume of time invested in playing sports.
That is, the mere fact that exercise is varied has a protective effect in itself, reducing the risk of dying from cardiovascular, respiratory, cancer and other pathologies by between 13% and 41%.
The best sports. The study also broke down the individual impact of each discipline, showing a non-linear dose-response relationship, making the greatest benefits noticeable at the beginning, when we went from doing nothing to doing something. In this way, the best sports according to science are the following:
- Walking: 17% less risk.
- Racquet sports (such as tennis): 15% less risk.
- Rowing and calisthenics: 14% less risk.
- Weight lifting: 13% less risk.
- Jogging/Easy Running: 11% less risk.
- Cycling: 4% less risk.
Its limitations. Logically, this note has important limitations, since the data were self-reported by the participants with questionnaires and the population analyzed was not too varied, being mostly white, so we must look to see if these percentages may vary by demographics.
However, the consensus is clear, since just as nutritionists have been recommending for years that we eat a “rainbow” of different vegetables instead of gorging on just spinach, sports science is now asking us for an “omnivorous movement diet” in which we combine different types of exercise on a daily basis.
Images | Anastase Maragos
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