Five Minutes a Day to Stay Fit? A Public Health Expert Pushes Back

Devi Sridhar has watched the same story circulate enough times to recognise the pattern. A new study lands, a number gets pulled from it, and within days the internet has a fresh shortcut to health. The latest version, drawn from research published in the Lancet, suggests five minutes of exercise a day might be enough. Sridhar, chair of global public health at the University of Edinburgh, does not buy it.

Writing in the Guardian, she describes a fitness culture split between two extremes. On one side sit the optimisers, the people chasing a hundred press-ups or a sub-seven-minute mile through some novel trick. On the other sit the minimisers, forever hunting the smallest dose of movement that still counts. Both impulses are understandable. Most people are busy, and the idea that a few minutes might do the job is genuinely appealing.

The problem, in her telling, is what the Lancet study actually measured.

What the research did, and did not, do

The authors worked with two bodies of evidence: individual data from seven large studies in the US, Norway and Sweden covering roughly 40,000 participants, plus UK Biobank data covering another 95,000. From this they modelled how many deaths might be averted by adding five minutes of moderate activity to a person's day. The estimate landed at a 6 to 10 percent reduction in deaths across the multi-country studies, with a smaller effect in the Biobank figures.

Sridhar does not dispute the methodology, which she calls sophisticated. Her objection is about interpretation. No one in the study was taken from a sedentary baseline, asked to move for five minutes daily, and then tracked. The researchers used existing activity data to model a relationship, then estimated what an extra five minutes might do for anyone, regardless of where they started.

Read that way, the finding says something less catchy but more honest. The largest gains belong to the people who currently do almost nothing. For them, a small amount of movement is meaningfully better than none. That is not the same as saying five minutes keeps a person fit.

The part the number leaves out

There is a second issue, and it has nothing to do with statistics. A focus on minutes ignores the kind of movement the body needs, particularly with age. Sridhar describes three categories that each do separate work.

Cardio, such as walking, cycling or swimming, conditions the heart and blood vessels. Strength work, from squats to carrying heavy loads, preserves muscle mass. Flexibility, the stretching most people skip, lowers the risk of injury and chronic pain. None substitutes for the others, and covering all three across a week takes more than a five-minute window allows.

This is where the official guidance enters. The World Health Organization, drawing on systematic reviews and prospective cohort studies, recommends adults get roughly 20 to 40 minutes of moderate activity a day, or 150 to 300 minutes a week. That range was not chosen to be punishing. It reflects the level that improves the widest set of health measures while staying realistic for most people.

A different question worth asking

Sridhar's frustration is less with the study than with how easily the bar keeps dropping. There is a useful trend in recent research, she allows. The idea that 7,000 steps may suffice rather than 10,000, or that a weekend-warrior pattern can still cut dementia risk, helps people fit movement into crowded lives. She is not arguing for marathons or competitive fitness events.

But a five-minute floor, she warns, risks making the standard meaningless. "Let's not make the bar so low that it becomes meaningless," she writes.

Her closing reframe is the most pointed part. Rather than asking how little exercise a person can survive on, she asks why a society cannot find 20 minutes in 24 hours for its members to move. If the answer is that work and daily life are structured to make even that difficult, the problem is not the recommendation. It is the structure.

For readers across Asia-Pacific, where long commutes and long office hours are common features of urban life, that framing may resonate more than any single number. The temptation to optimise downward is universal. So is the cost of taking the shortcut at face value.