Scientists at Iowa State University claim an hour of running gives you an extra seven hours of life.

You can get a lot done in seven hours.

You could watch Ran (1985) twice with time for a pee break, you could travel across 20 London Tube zones on a Sunday, you could play Monopoly while actually doing the auction rule, or you could just get your seven hours kip out of the way.

The new research from Iowa is a follow up to a study by from 2014 published in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology found that running for even 5-10 minutes per day is associated with reducing the risk of death from all causes and cardiovascular disease.

It analysed fitness data conducted by the Cooper Institute in Dallas.

In April, Progress in Cardiovascular Disease published the follow up study.

You can run from death

Like its predecessor, it was co-authored by Duck-chul Lee, a professor of kinesiology at Iowa State.

Consolidating the earlier findings, Lee and his team found their data indicated that going for a run dropped a person's risk of 'premature death' by 40 per cent.

This was regardless of the person's pace or mileage.

The main finding, which had also been seen in the first 2014 study, was how running returns more time to a person than the length of the run took up.

Specifically, if all those who participated in the study had taken up running, there would be 16 per cent fewer deaths, and 25 per cent fewer fatal heart attacks.

(The participants were mostly white and middle class).

Seven hours

The seven hours extra figure was based on these assumptions:

Two hours of training per week (based on the averaged reported to the Cooper Institute) would translate into less than six months of your an active life of 40 years.

This would produce greater life expectancy of 3.2 years, and a net gain of 2.8.

Although this mean seven hours for every hour spent running, Lee pointed out that running does not make your immortal.

HT New York Times