Air pollution can shorten your life. But there’s a way to offset some of its lethal effects.
Get some exercise.
A 17-year study in Denmark shows that while air pollution can endanger your health and lead to an earlier death, staying physically active can negate a portion of that danger.
“Even for those living in the most polluted areas of Copenhagen (the city where the study was conducted), it is healthier to go for a run, a walk or to cycle to work than it is to stay inactive,” says researcher Zorana Jovanovic Andersen who is with the Center for Epidemiology and Screening at the University of Copenhagen.
Andersen points out that other studies have shown that exercise shrinks your risk of premature mortality while air pollution increases your chances of an early demise. And even though exercise may mean you breathe more deeply and take in more pollutants from the air while you work out, you generally still improve your health over people who are sedentary.
“Air pollution is often perceived as a barrier to exercise in urban areas,” says Andersen. “In the face of an increasing health burden due to rising physical inactivity and obesity in modern societies, our findings provide support for efforts in promoting exercise, even in urban areas with high pollution. However, we would still advise people to exercise and cycle in green areas, parks, woods, with low air pollution and away from busy roads, when possible.”
Andersen’s research looked at the health and exercise habits of more than 52,000 middle-aged urban Danes from 1993 to 2010. Folks who exercised, even if they lived in parts of Copenhagen that had the worst traffic and the most crowded roads, had a 20 percent less chance of dying during the study than people who never worked up a sweat.
The best kind of exercise to do in order to increase air exchange and build more powerful lungs isn’t aerobics or cardio, however. Those make your lungs more efficient, and smaller. What you want is power, and to get that, you need shorter, higher intensity exercise.
A good way to do this is a hard sprint on a stationary bike, for example. Just 2 or 3 minutes of sprinting separated by rest periods challenges your heart and lungs to grow stronger to keep up, increasing your lungpower and your ability to exchange and filter lots of air.
