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I was blown away at just how little exercise is required to significantly increase your lifespan: 20 minutes a day, 3 times a week. That's it.

The Copenhagen City Heart Study, published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 2018 found that light jogging for 20 minutes a day, 3x a week reduces all-cause mortality by 78%.

That's insane.

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It's a logarithmic curve. On a 1 to 10 scale, increasing activity from 0 to 1 provides a large decrease in mortality. Going from 1 to 2 another big jump. But 2 to 3 is less, until finally it plateaus.

But yes, people don't realize that even just walking at a moderate pace for 20 min 3 times a week provides huge benefits if you are otherwise completely sedentary.

Assuming 80 year lifespan -10 years of childhood this comes out to approximately 1 year spent on exercise. That does not include preparation and recovery times.

If you have to measure time spent and do cost/benefit analysis, you're most likely not going to stick with it for the entirety of life.

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