Colon cancer survivors: your treadmill might just be a time machine

Good news for anyone who’s ever dragged themselves to a gym class and thought, “Why am I doing this?”. Science has an answer: to live longer.

A massive new study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, has revealed that sticking to a structured exercise programme after chemotherapy for colon cancer can seriously boost your odds of staying cancer-free and alive.

The phase 3 CHALLENGE trial (we love a dramatic acronym) tracked 889 colon cancer survivors across 55 medical centres from 2009 to 2024. Half of them were assigned to a 3-year structured exercise regime, and the other half were given health education materials — the paper equivalent of a well-meaning pamphlet.

Fast-forward almost 8 years, and the results are in: the exercisers were winning.

Key stats:

• 5-year disease-free survival was 80.3% in the exercise group vs 73.9% in the education group.
• That’s a 6.4% difference — not exactly couch-change.
• Even more impressively, 8-year overall survival was 90.3% for the active folks, compared to 83.2% for the ones who skipped the squats.

Translation? That’s a 7.1% survival boost just from lacing up and getting moving.

Of course, there were a few more achy joints in the exercise camp, musculoskeletal complaints showed up in 18.5% of them (compared to 11.5% in the education group), but let’s be honest: most of us have pulled a hamstring just trying to put on skinny jeans.

The study’s authors, led by Dr Kerry Courneya and an all-star team of oncologists, exercise scientists, and researchers, say this is the strongest evidence yet that exercise doesn’t just help you feel better after cancer — it might help you beat it.

So, what kind of exercise are we talking? The structured programme involved moderate to vigorous aerobic activity, building up to 150 minutes a week. That’s about 30 minutes a day, five times a week — the kind of thing your fitness tracker has been nagging you to do anyway.

The bottom line? If you’ve gone through treatment for colon cancer, getting active could be one of the most powerful things you do next. And for everyone else? Yet another reason to stop ghosting your gym membership.