It’s never too late to be active! If you start exercising you can reap the benefits for longevity today!

A new study gives hope to those of you who may have slacked off on exercise in recent years. It finds that if people start to exercise in midlife, even if they have not worked out for many years, they can experience rapid gains!!!

But! The reverse is also true, the study finds.

If you stop exercising: those longevity benefits shrink and disappear.

We already know that exercise affects how long and well we live.

Frequent exercise is linked to longer life spans.

But most studies have looked at exercise habits only once in peoples’ lives, rarely looking at how our workout routines ebb and flow with different setbacks as we age.

So, this new study, which was published this month in JAMA Network Open, researchers with the National Cancer Institute looked at how people occupy their leisure time, too!

It began in 1995, enrolling hundreds of thousands of women between 50 and 71 years old and asking them to complete a series of questionnaires about their health. The questionnaire focused primarily on deliberate exercise, but also covered incidental physical activity like household chores or yard work. The questionnaire covered almost all points of the participants’ lives, from their teens all the way up until recent years where many of the participants were 50-61.

Some women said they had been committed to their workout routines, spending about as many hours exercising in midlife as when they had been teenagers. Others had been active when young but tailed off as adults, remaining mostly sedentary during middle age. Looking in the National Death Index for deaths and their causes among the participants in the years since they had joined the health study and compared the risks of dying among the different groups.

Not surprisingly, those women who had been sedentary throughout their lives were the most likely now to have died, particularly from heart disease.

And those who’d always been active, exercising consistently for a few hours a week, were about 30 to 35 percent less likely to die prematurely.

More hopeful, though, was the people who HAD STOPPED exercising for a DECADE or TWO but begun again during their 40s or 50s—Only working out then for a few hours a week—shared the SAME protection against premature death as the people who ALWAYS had exercised.

And, maybe surprising to most, was that people who had been active and in shape as teenagers or young adults but had grown more sedentary in middle age seemed to LOSE ALL longevity benefits.

So, it’s never too late to be active! If you start exercising you can reap the benefits for longevity today!