Becoming a jack of all trades in the gym might be one of the keys to living a longer, healthier life, a new study suggests.
“The takeaway is refreshingly practical: Don’t put all your movement eggs in one basket,” says Mark Kovacs, PhD, an exercise physiologist based in Atlanta who has researched longevity and athletic performance, but wasn’t involved in the study. “You don’t need extreme workouts or complex programming. Simple variety goes a long way.”
What the Study Found
Researchers looked at data from more than 111,000 healthcare professionals, women and men, who were involved in the Nurses’ Health Study and the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study over the course of more than 30 years.
All participants reported their physical activity type and length every couple of years throughout the study period. For each participant, researchers calculated a physical activity variety score, based on how many of the following types of exercise they did consistently:
- Walking
- Jogging
- Running
- Bicycling
- Swimming
- Tennis, squash, or racquetball
- Climbing flights of stairs
- Rowing or calisthenics
- Weight training or resistance exercises
After analyzing the interplay between exercise variety and causes of death, researchers found that people with the highest exercise variety score experienced:
- 19 percent lower risk of death from any cause, compared with people with the lowest exercise variety, regardless of total time spent exercising
- 13 to 41 percent lower risk of death from heart disease, cancer, respiratory disease, and other causes
“We were particularly intrigued by the finding that a simple physical activity variety score remained associated with lower mortality after accounting for the total amount of physical activity,” says lead study author Han Han, PhD, a postdoctoral research fellow at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health Department of Nutrition in Boston.
“This pattern suggests that regularly engaging in a mix of activity types may confer additional longevity benefits that are not fully captured by total activity volume alone,” Dr. Han says.
How Does Exercise Support Living Longer?
“What this study adds is a critical new dimension to the exercise-longevity conversation,” says Dr. Kovacs. “We’ve known for decades that total physical activity is associated with lower mortality, but this research shows that variety itself matters. In other words, longevity is influenced not just by how much you move, but by how many different ways you move.”
For future studies, the researchers suggest looking at combinations of different activities and specific health outcomes to identify a potentially optimal mix for longevity.
It’s also worth noting that physical activity in the study was self-reported, which can introduce some measurement error. While the large sample size analyzed over the course of three decades strengthens confidence in the findings, Kovacs points out that the cohorts were largely composed of white health professionals, which could limit generalizability to the general population.
How to Get More Variety in Your Home Workouts
“The amount of physical activity is important in its own right and should remain a priority. What we wish to emphasize here is that, when the total amount of activity is held constant, engaging in a greater variety of physical activities, rather than simply relying on a single type alone, may be more beneficial for longevity,” Han says.
For most healthy adults, Kovacs typically suggests a workout routine combining aerobic movement, strength training, dynamic or skill-based activity (like tennis), and low-intensity lifestyle movement (such as gardening or taking the stairs).
For people who are already active, this could look like replacing one cardio session with strength training, or adding a recreational sport once a week, Kovacs says.
“Longevity isn’t about doing one thing perfectly; it’s about challenging the body in multiple complementary ways, consistently, over decades.”