In my view, physical fitness is mainly for full-life functionality, energy, and fun - not to prevent death. Delaying death is fine, of course, if the life before death arrives is full, productive, and physically, mentally, and spiritually engaging.
In civilized cultures, generally your odds are almost 50/50 heart disease or cancer unless you are one of those who just dies from decrepitude, feebleness, and general body rot. What's your preference? Mine is to go via a quick cardiac arrythmia or a stroke while doing something fun, and too far from any medical help that might force me to survive with a nasty disability which would damage my dignity and make me a burden on others.
Everybody in western cultures has some degree of arterial disease after age 40 or 50 whether it is diagnosable or not. It's part of ageing, especially in an affluent society with plenty of good antibiotics available to make sure you don't die of pneumonia.
If you care, this study suggests that stressful aerobic cardio exercise 5 days/week is beneficial for cardiac health. That means keeping your heart rate at around 65-70% of your max for an hour. That is neither easy not comfortable because it means to stay intensely aerobic, ie huffing and puffing and sweating - but at a rate to be able to keep it up. In fact, it's a bitch to do. That's why few do it.
More efficient to do anaerobic HIIT in my opinion. They didn't study that.
A bit more below the fold -
Cardiac vitality is not the whole of fitness. All I can fit into my routine is one or two high-octane cardio/calisthenic classes weekly. In my "Balanced" program, I also need 2 days of weights to stay strong, and time to do my accessory exercises and my jump rope, and maybe my Long Endurance "cardio" (which is not real cardio but is better than sitting and counts as an "Active Recovery" day).
Weights and Yoga obviously showed no cardio benefits. Why would they? They are strength-maintenance, and just one fourth of general fitness. What's a General Functional Fitness program? It is a combo of appropriate Nutrition to be strong with little body fat to lug around, plus Cardio, Strength/Weights, and Athleticism Training/Calisthenics.
