We all know summer is getting closer and the words “summer body” make you want to stay indoors in your 5-year-old XXL Kappa Gamma T-shirt, but it’s time to get your ass up and go on a run. Most betches don’t have the time or the patience to commit to a long workout, and according to this new bomb study, you don’t have to. That’s because, despite what your annoying friend who’s training for a marathon will tell you, you only need to run five minutes a day to live longer. That’s right, you literally have no excuse for the lazy denegerate lifestyle you’re currently living.
This study, which was recently published in Progress in Cardiovascular Disease, basically compared the health of people who ran versus people like me who are allergic to exercise don’t run. Unfortunately for everyone who’s sick of hearing their smug friend talk about their “runner’s high” (STFU Caroline, you ran two and a half miles, it doesn’t work like that) researchers found that runners live three more years on average than non-runners. They also found that running lowers your risk of premature death by 40 percent, but I’m going off context and assuming they mean death from things like heart attack and stroke and not, say, liver failure caused by your five-nights-a-week going out habit. So like, just because you ran a mile today does not make you immortal (ahem, Caroline).
But the good news is you can start getting all the fun health benefits of running without becoming super annoying spending hours at your local track. That’s because the researchers calculated that running just two hours a week can add about three years to your life span. For those of you who aren’t good at basic division, that amounts to just over 17 minutes a day—in other words, totally doable. But for the extremely lazy among us, you can still get some of those longevity benefits by running just five minutes a day. Yep, five fucking minutes. For less than the amount of time you spend stalking your ex on Instagram, you could be extending your life.
And in case you thought this study couldn’t reaffirm your lifestyle choices anymore, just wait. While your exercise-addicted friend might think the more she runs, the healthier she’ll be, the researchers found that the limit does actually exist. More specifically, your health benefits will plateau if you run more than four hours a week. They didn’t explicitly say this, but clearly the takeaway here is that you should never run more than 35 minutes per day because it’s basically pointless and you could get the same health benefits while expending less effort. Thanks, Science!
So the overall takeaway of this study is that you can’t use the “I’m sooo busy” excuse to avoid exercise anymore and it’s time to get off your ass—you know, that thing you’ve been sitting on for the past six months?
