To exercise, or not to exercise: that is not the question.

For no matter your views on Shakespeare (or writers who glibly reference his work), exercise is unquestionably good for you. In fact, according to another, albeit lesser man of letters, it’s the answer to longer life.

In Outlive: The Science of Art and Longevity, scholar and doctor Peter Attia calls exercise “the most potent longevity ‘drug’ in our arsenal, in terms of lifespan and healthspan.” He does so because “the data are unambiguous: exercise not only delays actual death but also prevents both cognitive and physical decline, better than any other intervention.”

But does one specific type of exercise delay death better than others?

Now that’s a question worthy of Hamlet’s and your deepest contemplation. It’s also the question that’s the impetus of a study published by BMJ Medicine online in January.

Researchers at Harvard University and the Chongqing Medical University in Chongqing, China took another look at the data accrued on about 110,000 health professionals who took part in either the Nurses’ Health Study or the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study. They focused on the responses to the questions the participants were asked an average of 13 times over roughly 30 years and found what they expected to find.

That when it comes to exercise, it’s generally a matter of more being better — but only up to a point. A point that really doesn’t take all that much time to reach with moderate effort.

A lowered risk of death, for instance, leveled off for typical weight trainers after performing about 120 minutes of exercise per week. For 10-minute-per-mile joggers, it occurred after 65 minutes.

The plateau for bicyclists was not as clear. In the Nurses’ Health Study, it happened after riding 75 minutes at about 13 miles per hour, though it took longer in the Health Professionals Follow-Up Study.

But when the researchers considered the participants’ degree of exercise variety by creating a “physical activity variety score,” a far-less-expected finding emerged. In comparison to those who scored in the bottom fourth, those who scored in the top fourth had a 13 percent lower mortality rate for cardiovascular disease, cancer, and respiratory disease — and their all-cause mortality rate was 19 percent lower.

In other words, you get more bang for your exercise longevity buck by mixing it up. Or in the words Zeeshan Khan, MD, chief of geriatrics at Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University Medical Center in New Jersey, “[Exercise] variety is just as important as volume.”

Khan utters those words when assessing the BMJ study for Medical New Today, and while they are true, so too is the fact that importance is not the same as necessity. Ergo, they fail to answer the question posed in today’s title: “Is exercise variety a necessity for longevity?”

That’s a question, however, that can never be definitively answered, and truth be told, I knew as much before posing it. But asking it is not a cheap trick to pique reader interest, but rather testimony to the absolutely awesome power of the mind.

In that power you’ll find an answer that works for you. And in the following study, you’ll see just how that can be true.

It was published by Psychological Science in 2007 and primarily penned by Ali Crum. She’s now a psychology professor at Stanford University who’s so highly regarded that Adam Grant, a psychologist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the bestselling author of five science and psychology books, considers her the “preeminent health psychologist of her generation.”

In what’s now known as the Housekeeper’s study, Crum and colleagues asked 88 housekeepers to rate how much exercise they got on a scale from 1 to 10. One-third — somehow oblivious to the fact that pushing heavy carts, vacuuming, climbing stairs, and cleaning toilets still qualifies according to the Surgeon General’s guidelines as exercise — said zero. Just as bafflingly, the average overall score was 3.

The entire group of housekeepers was then divided in half, and both groups were instructed not to change anything at all in their lives. But one group was taken to school, in a manner of speaking.

They attended several presentations where the key takeaway was always the same. That housekeeping duties qualified as exercise, and that a typical housekeeper’s workweek easily exceeded the Surgeon General’s suggested amount of exercise.

Four weeks later, all the health tests performed on the housekeepers at the start of the study were performed again. The group of women who now knew their work doubled as exercise had — without any increase in exercise or decrease in calories — lost weight, improved their hip-to-waist ratio, and lowered systolic blood pressure by an average of 10 points.

Just as importantly, Crum tells Andrew Huberman when she spoke about the study on the scientist-turned-social-influencer’s podcast, the housekeepers started feeling better about themselves, their bodies and their work.