What's the Exercise Sweet Spot for Longevity?

Key takeaways

• Tracking 147,000+ adults for up to 30 years, researchers found the “sweet spot” for strength training was about 90–120 minutes per week.

• In that range, people had about a 13% lower risk of death overall, 19% lower risk from cardiovascular causes, and 27% lower risk from neurological causes.

• The lowest mortality was in people who combined regular cardio with 60–119 minutes of weekly strength work, reinforcing that both types of exercise matter.

Strength training has often played second fiddle to cardio in conversations about longevity, but this long‑running analysis suggests it deserves more attention. Researchers pooled data from three big U.S. cohorts, totaling 147,374 men and women who repeatedly reported their weekly strength and aerobic activity over about three decades.

They then linked these long‑term patterns to deaths from all causes, plus deaths from cardiovascular, neurological, and cancer causes. After adjusting for age, lifestyle, and health factors, a clear pattern emerged: benefits climbed up to about 90–119 minutes of strength training per week, then plateaued.

What the “sweet spot” looked like

Compared with people who did no strength training, those doing 90–119 minutes weekly had a 13% lower risk of dying from any cause during follow‑up. Within that same range, the risk of cardiovascular death was about 19% lower, and the risk of death from neurological causes was about 27% lower.

The pattern for cancer was a bit different: the biggest reductions appeared at lower doses. Just 1–29 minutes of weekly strength training was linked to a 21% lower cancer death risk, and 30–59 minutes to an 18% lower risk.

Why pairing strength with cardio gave the best results

The study also looked at how strength work and aerobic exercise interacted. Aerobic activity on its own was powerful: doing more than the equivalent of 150 minutes of moderate cardio per week (over 7.5 MET hours) was tied to a 26–43% lower risk of death.

Strength training alone for 1–59 or 60–119 minutes a week gave a modest additional 7–11% reduction compared with no strength work and low cardio. But the lowest mortality of all showed up in people who did both: those with 30–44 MET hours of aerobic activity and 60–119 minutes of strength training had about a 45% lower risk of death than those doing little of either.

Among very active people (45+ MET hours of cardio per week), overall risk of death was 53–58% lower, regardless of the exact strength‑training dose. That pattern supports current advice to combine regular cardio with muscle‑strengthening activities rather than choosing one over the other.

Important caveats behind the numbers

This was an observational study, so it cannot prove that strength training itself caused the lower mortality risk. People who lift regularly also tended to have other healthy habits—lower weight, better diet, and more overall movement—which the researchers tried to account for but cannot fully separate.

Exercise was self‑reported every two years, which can be imprecise, and some forms of strength work (like Pilates or calisthenics) were not fully captured. The study also lacked detailed information on how intense each strength session was or how long individual workouts lasted.

A practical way to translate this into weekly habits

For most people, the “sweet spot” the study points to looks like 2–3 reasonably focused strength sessions per week, adding up to roughly 90–120 minutes. In practice, that might be three 30–40‑minute workouts using weights or body weight (squats, lunges, presses, rows) plus regular walking, jogging, cycling, or other cardio spread across the week.

The broader message is encouraging: you do not need hours in the gym every day to see long‑term benefits. Consistently hitting a moderate amount of both cardio and strength over years is what showed up as most strongly linked to a longer, healthier life.

References:

1. Yiwen Zhang, Dong Hoon Lee, Leandro F M Rezende, Yuan Ma, Edward Giovannucci. Long-term resistance training with all-cause and cause-specific mortality: assessing dose-response and joint associations with aerobic physical activity. British Journal of Sports Medicine, 2026; bjsports-2025-110503 DOI: 10.1136/bjsports-2025-110503