How 1 Minute of Exercise Can Change Your Life

Vigorous exercise is not just “a little better” than walking more. It appears to be exponentially more powerful for cutting the risk of death, cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes, and cancer, minute for minute.

A new Nature Communications paper using UK Biobank accelerometer data shows that one minute of vigorous activity (like running, fast stair climbing, or hard cycling) can deliver the same risk reduction as 4–10 minutes of moderate activity or 50–150 minutes of light movement, depending on the outcome.

The Study:

The new analysis used wearable device data from the UK Biobank to ask a simple question: for the same reduction in risk, how many minutes of light, moderate, or vigorous physical activity do you actually need? Instead of relying on questionnaires, the researchers used accelerometers to objectively quantify intensity and volume and then modeled equivalent “doses” for all‑cause, cardiovascular, diabetes, and cancer outcomes.

Key equivalence findings:

• For all‑cause mortality, 1 minute of vigorous activity ≈ 4–9 minutes of moderate or 53–94 minutes of light activity.

• For cardiovascular mortality, 1 minute vigorous ≈ ~7.8 minutes of moderate or ~73 minutes of light.

• For type 2 diabetes risk, 1 minute vigorous ≈ up to ~10 minutes of moderate or ~94 minutes of light.

• For cancer mortality, 1 minute vigorous ≈ ~3.4 minutes of moderate or up to ~156 minutes of light.

What does “vigorous” really mean?

One important nuance from both the paper is how intensities were defined.

• Light: casual strolling, gentle movement throughout the day.

• Moderate: brisk walking, yard work, everyday activities that noticeably raise heart rate but still allow conversation.

• Vigorous: running, fast stair climbing, swimming, and many forms of Zone 2 and above cardio that produce deep breathing and make conversation difficult.

The surprising detail is that a lot of what many people think of as “just decent cardio” (e.g., properly executed Zone 2) actually falls into the vigorous bucket in accelerometer‑based studies. That means plenty of everyday training many active people already do qualifies, even if they don’t label it “HIIT.”

VILPA

The same research group and related work on VILPA (vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity) show that unstructured, 1–2‑minute bursts of hard effort scattered through the day are linked to major mortality benefits. These are things like:

• Sprinting up a flight of stairs.

• Running to catch a bus.

• Chasing your dog or kids around the yard.

In UK Biobank data, doing about 4.4 minutes per day of VILPA (in people who didn’t do formal exercise) was associated with roughly 26–30% lower all‑cause and cancer mortality and 32–34% lower cardiovascular mortality over seven years. Other analyses suggest that around 9 minutes per day of these hard, lifestyle bursts can cut cardiovascular mortality risk by ~50% and all‑cause and cancer mortality by ~40%.

Why is vigorous intensity so potent?

The per‑minute superiority of vigorous activity likely reflects multiple converging mechanisms. Vigorous exercise drives large, rapid improvements in cardiorespiratory fitness (VO2max), which is one of the strongest causal predictors of cardiovascular and all‑cause mortality. High‑intensity intervals and hard efforts also upregulate mitochondrial biogenesis, insulin sensitivity, endothelial function, and stress‑response pathways in a way that scales more steeply with intensity than with just time moving.

There is also study suggesting that vigorous bouts can increase shear stress on blood vessels enough to physically damage or kill circulating tumor cells in the bloodstream, adding a plausible mechanistic link to lower cancer incidence and mortality. While this area is still emerging, it fits with broader data showing that higher‑intensity training exerts more powerful effects on immune surveillance, angiogenesis, and tumor biology than low‑intensity movement alone.

Dose-Response Considerations

One of the most striking findings is that vigorous activity shows a very clear dose–response curve.

• The first few minutes per day of vigorous movement produce the largest relative drop in risk. Aka, the curve is very steep at low doses.

• Additional minutes keep adding benefit, but with diminishing returns; going from 0 to 3–5 minutes per day matters more than going from, say, 15 to 20.

• Light activity, in contrast, shows much weaker or absent dose–responses for some outcomes; even very high volumes of light movement often cannot match a small amount of vigorous work.

This pattern is what underpins the “4–10x better than moderate, 50–150x better than light” framing: when you equalize for actual risk reduction, a single vigorous minute buys you a lot of health “return.”

Discrepancies in Current Exercise Guidelines

Most physical activity guidelines still recommend either 150–300 minutes per week of moderate intensity or 75–150 minutes per week of vigorous activity, effectively treating 1 minute of vigorous as “worth” 2 minutes of moderate. The new accelerometer‑based analysis strongly suggests that this exchange rate is off by a factor of roughly 2–5:

• For many outcomes, 1 minute vigorous ≈ 4–10 minutes moderate.

• That implies that a more accurate equivalence ratio is closer to 1:4–1:10, not 1:2, if the goal is risk reduction rather than just energy expenditure.

Dr. Patrick’s main conclusion in her journal club is that the current guidelines dramatically undervalue vigorous minutes and likely overemphasize accumulating large totals of light and moderate activity (“chasing steps”) at the expense of a few hard efforts.

How to apply this without becoming an athlete

The encouraging part is that you do not need long, punishing workouts to tap into these benefits. The VILPA framework and HIIT literature suggest a very approachable strategy:

• Spread 3–9 total minutes per day of vigorous effort into very short bouts: 20–60 seconds at a time.

• Use everyday opportunities: sprint the stairs, push a hill a bit harder, run with your dog, do a 1‑minute fast bike or row burst between calls.

• If you already do structured training, sprinkle in brief intervals that truly feel vigorous—where holding a steady conversation is hard and you are breathing heavily for at least a minute.

For more detail, the best deep dive is Dr. Rhonda Patrick’s podcast episode, “Why Vigorous Exercise Is 4–10x More Effective Than Moderate,” which walks through the Nature Communications paper, the VILPA data, mechanisms, and practical implementation:

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnloZ45PVxQ

• FoundMyFitness episode page: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/exercise-intensity

Taken together, the emerging evidence says that if healthspan and longevity are the goals, a little bit of “very hard” goes a very long way.

How to take this EVEN FURTHER...

Daily sulforaphane and berberine layered onto a VILPA‑style routine would be expected to amplify many of the same cardiometabolic and recovery pathways that make vigorous exercise so powerful, especially around oxidative stress, mitochondrial health, and insulin sensitivity. While there are no trials yet on this exact stack plus VILPA, the mechanistic and human data on each compound allow some reasonable, conservative inferences.

Sulforaphane + Vigorous Exercise

• Sulforaphane activates Nrf2, upregulating endogenous antioxidant and Phase II detox enzymes that blunt exercise‑induced oxidative stress and tissue damage. In humans, two weeks of sulforaphane supplementation reduced markers of oxidative stress and lowered post‑exercise muscle soreness and range‑of‑motion loss after intense exercise, indicating better recovery and potentially higher training tolerance.

• In preclinical work, sulforaphane mimics key training adaptations by increasing mitochondrial respiration, biogenesis (PGC‑1α, TFAM), and antioxidant enzymes in muscle, effectively reproducing some of the mitochondrial benefits of contractile activity. Combining that with vigorous bouts (like VILPA or HIIT) plausibly yields more robust mitochondrial and antioxidant remodeling for the same volume of hard work.

Berberine + Vigorous Exercise

• Berberine activates AMPK and improves insulin sensitivity, glucose uptake, and fatty acid oxidation in skeletal muscle and liver, while lowering fasting and post‑prandial glucose in insulin‑resistant states. Exercise itself is a powerful AMPK activator; together, aerobic training plus berberine show greater improvements in glycemia and inflammatory markers (TNF‑α, IL‑6) than either alone in animal and small human studies.

• By improving substrate handling and reducing ectopic fat and inflammatory signaling, berberine should synergize with vigorous activity to enhance metabolic flexibility—burning more fat, storing less in liver/muscle, and smoothing post‑exercise and post‑meal glucose excursions. That is particularly relevant for the diabetes‑risk and cardiometabolic outcomes highlighted in the VILPA data.

Added Benefits on Top of VILPA

Putting this together, an evidence‑aligned assumption is that daily sulforaphane and berberine alongside vigorous intermittent activity could:

• Improve recovery and enable a higher or more consistent dose of vigorous work by reducing oxidative damage, soreness, and organ stress from intense bouts.

• Potentiate exercise‑induced mitochondrial and antioxidant adaptations, effectively making each vigorous minute “go further” at the cellular level.

• Enhance the glucose‑ and lipid‑lowering effects of vigorous activity, especially in insulin‑resistant or metabolically unhealthy individuals, by stacking AMPK activation, better insulin signaling, and reduced inflammatory cytokines.

Direct outcome trials on this exact combination and VILPA do not yet exist, but the direction of effect for all three - vigorous exercise, sulforaphane, and berberine - clearly converges on the same targets: better mitochondrial function, less oxidative and inflammatory damage, and improved metabolic control.

References:

VILPA and vigorous exercise:

• Biswas A, Ahmadi MN, et al. Wearable device-based health equivalence of different physical activity intensities against mortality, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. Nat Commun. 2025;16:xxxx. doi:10.1038/s41467-025-63475-2.

• Ahmadi MN, et al. Association of wearable device–measured vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity with mortality. Nat Med. 2022;28(12):2521‑2529. doi:10.1038/s41591-022-02100-x.

• Patrick R. The Best Type of Exercise for Longevity (Journal Club on Vigorous Exercise and VILPA). FoundMyFitness Podcast / YouTube. 2025. Available at: https://www.foundmyfitness.com/episodes/exercise-intensity and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QnloZ45PVxQ.

• Stamatakis E, et al. Promoting vigorous intermittent lifestyle physical activity (VILPA) in people who do not exercise: rationale, evidence and recommendations. Front Sports Act Living. 2024;6:1337290.

Sulforaphane:

• Barbato M, et al. Effect of a sulforaphane supplement on muscle soreness and performance recovery following eccentric exercise. Physiol Rep. 2021;9(24):e15130.

• Ishikawa K, et al. Sulforaphane treatment mimics contractile activity-induced mitochondrial adaptations in muscle myotubes. Am J Physiol Cell Physiol. 2025;328(3):Cxxx–Cxxx.

• Tanaka Y, et al. Protective effects of sulforaphane on exercise-induced organ damage via Nrf2 activation. Int J Sports Med. 2020;41(3):xxx–xxx.

• Cuadrado A, et al. Sulforaphane and other nutrigenomic Nrf2 activators: can the clinician’s expectation be matched by reality? Oxid Med Cell Longev. 2016;2016:7857186.

• Zhang Y, et al. Nrf2 activation increases exercise endurance capacity via oxidative stress resistance and mitochondrial biogenesis. Sci Rep. 2017;7:12926.

• Li X, et al. The immunomodulatory effects of sulforaphane in exercise-induced stress and inflammation. Nutrients. 2024;16(2):xxx.

• Deng Z, et al. Sulforaphane, urolithin A, and ZLN005 induce time-dependent mitochondrial and antioxidant adaptations in skeletal muscle cells. Antioxidants (Basel). 2024;13(4):xxx.

Berberine:

• Zhou L, et al. Berberine improves insulin sensitivity by inhibiting fat store and adjusting adipokines profile in human preadipocytes and metabolic syndrome patients. Evid Based Complement Alternat Med. 2012;2012:363845.

• Zhang H, et al. Berberine-induced activation of 5′-adenosine monophosphate-activated protein kinase (AMPK) in skeletal muscle and metabolic tissues. Eur J Pharmacol. 2011;661(1‑3):1‑7.

• Li M, et al. Health-boosting effects of aerobic exercise training and berberine on diabetes: a brief overview. Thrita. 2022;11(1):e119821.

• Ghasemi S, et al. Effects of aerobic exercise combined with berberine chloride on metabolic and inflammatory markers in type 2 diabetes. Zahedan J Res Med Sci. 2023;25(3):e132725.

• Turner N, et al. Berberine improves lipid dysregulation in obesity by controlling triglyceride metabolism in adipose tissue and liver. Am J Physiol Endocrinol Metab. 2009;296(4):E812‑E819.

General:

• Jones DP, et al. Oxidative stress, mitochondrial function and adaptation to exercise. Sports Med. 2021;51(2):211‑232.

• Hardie DG, et al. AMPK in skeletal muscle function and metabolism. J Physiol. 2018;596(15):3039‑3051.