My Health

Staying Active: Every Body's Path to Better Health


Introduction
Although there are no sure-fire recipes for good health, the mixture of healthy eating and regular exercise comes awfully close.
Regular exercise or physical activity can do everyone a world of good. It helps prevent heart disease, diabetes, osteoporosis, and a host of other diseases, and is a key ingredient for losing weight or maintaining a healthy weight.
Despite all the good things going for it, only a minority of Americans get enough exercise or leisure-time physical activity to benefit. Only 30 percent of adult Americans get regular physical activity during their leisure time—and 40 percent of Americans get no leisure-time physical activity at all.

How Much Do I Need? Physical Activity

When it comes to physical activity, some is better than none, and more is better.
The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association recommend that healthy adults get a minimum of 30 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity on five days each week, or get a minimum of 20 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic activity on three days of the week.
But if you don't currently exercise and aren't very active during the day, any increase in exercise or physical activity is good for you. Start slow, and gradually build up the length and intensity of your workouts over time.
Regular physical activity:

  • Improves your chances of living longer and living healthier
  • Helps protect you from developing heart disease or its precursors, high blood pressure and high cholesterol
  • Helps protect you from developing certain cancers, including colon and breast cancer
  • Helps prevent type 2 diabetes (what was once called adult-onset diabetes), as well as its complications
  • Helps prevent the insidious loss of bone known as osteoporosis
  • Reduces the risk of falling among older adults
  • Relieves symptoms of depression and anxiety and improves mood
  • Controls weight

The Cost of Inactivity
If exercise and regular physical activity benefit the body, a sedentary lifestyle does the opposite. Inactivity has been associated with more than 9 million cases of cardiovascular disease

Reaping the Benefits of Exercise
What is the best kind of exercise? And how much exercise do we need each day?
If you don't currently exercise and aren't very active during the day, any increase in exercise or physical activity is good for you. Aerobic physical activity—any activity that causes a noticeable increase in your heart rate—is especially beneficial for disease prevention. Some studies show that walking briskly for even one to two hours a week (15 to 20 minutes a day) starts to decrease the chances of having a heart attack or stroke, developing diabetes, or dying prematurely.

For the average person, brisk walking fills the bill for moderate-intensity activity, while jogging is an example of vigorous-intensity activity. How fast is brisk? For the average person, it means walking three to four miles an hour, or about as fast as you'd walk if you were late for an important appointment. Keep in mind that what feels like moderate activity for one person may actually be very vigorous activity for another:
Walking is an ideal exercise for many people—it doesn't require any special equipment, can be done any time, any place, and at any pace, and is generally very safe.
It has been demonstrated that this simple form of exercise substantially reduces the chances of developing heart disease, stroke, and diabetes in different populations.
If you don't like walking, any activity that makes your heart work harder will suffice, as long as you do it long enough and often enough.

 

Nutrition In-Depth

How Hard Should I Exercise?
If you are exercising mainly to lose weight or maintain a healthy weight, 30 minutes or so a day may work if you're careful about how much you eat. But you may need to exercise more, or more vigorously.

Feeling What's Right
The current recommendations for physical activity are general recommendations aimed at the general population. The problem with guidelines is that they try to cover as many people as possible. In other words, they aren't right for everyone. How much exercise you need depends on your genes, your diet, how much muscle and fat you carry on your frame, how fit you are, and your capacity for exercise.
If an exercise or physical activity feels hard, then it is probably doing your heart—and the rest of you—some good, even if it doesn't fall into the "moderate" category. If you are currently not active at all, it may be daunting to start out with 30 minutes a day of activity, five days a week. So start with a shorter, less-intense bout of activity, and gradually increase over time until you can reach or exceed this goal. This "start slow, build up over time" advice for physical activity applies to everyone, but it's especially true for older adults,since starting slowly can help lower the risk of injury—and can make exercise more enjoyable.
Don't get stuck in a rut, though. As your body adapts to exercise, you'll need to push yourself more and more to get the same cardiovascular workout. Another way to know that it's time to pick up the pace is if you see your weight or waist size start creeping up on you.

Resistance Training
Resistance training or weight training is probably the most neglected component of fitness programs but one of the most beneficial. In fact, it's so beneficial that the American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association recommend that adults engage in resistance training at least twice a week, to improve muscle strength and endurance.
To understand why strength training is so important to our overall fitness, it helps to understand a bit about body composition. Our body can basically be divided into two components. Fat mass consists of the body's fat store, while fat-free mass is a combination of non-fat tissue such as muscle, bone, internal organs, and so on. A significant part of fat-free mass is lean body mass, which is essentially muscle.

Muscle is metabolically active tissue. This means that it utilizes calories to work, repair, and refuel itself. Fat requires very few calories—it just kind of sits there. As we enter our mid to late twenties, we slowly start to lose muscle as part of the natural aging process. This means that the amount of calories we need each day starts to decrease, and it becomes easier to gain weight. By engaging in regular strength training exercise, it is possible to decrease this loss of lean muscle tissue and even replace some that has been lost already.
Another beneficial effect of resistance training pertains to bone health. In addition to weight bearing cardiovascular exercise, weight training has been shown to help fight osteoporosis.
In older populations, resistance training can help maintain the ability to perform functional tasks such as walking, rising from a chair, climbing stairs, and even carrying one's own groceries. An emerging area of research suggests that muscular strength and fitness may also be important to reducing the risk of chronic disease and mortality, but more research is needed.

Flexibility Training
The American Heart Association recommends that healthy adults engage in flexibility training two to three days per week, stretching major muscle and tendon groups.

The Bottom Line: Tips for Getting Exercise into your Life

  • Get off a stop or two earlier during your bus or subway commute; walk the rest of the way.
  • Purposefully park your car a little further from the mall or store. It may not seem like much, but over weeks and months, these minutes of exercise add up.
  • Use the stairs instead of elevators and escalators whenever possible.
  • Consider buying a piece of cardiovascular equipment for your home (e.g. treadmill, bike, elliptical machine). Home models can be more reasonable than you think, and you can't beat the convenience.
  • When you get busy, try to combine your cardiovascular exercise with something that you do already. Hop on that piece of home equipment while watching TV, reading the newspaper, or returning phone calls.
  • Make it fun! Try a new sport like tennis or rollerblading. The more that you enjoy exercise, the more likely you are to stick to it.
  • Make it social. Walk with a friend, your spouse, or your family in the morning or evening.
  • Keep an exercise log. It will help to make you more accountable.
  • Take a walk for 20 minutes of your lunch hour.
  • Hire a personal trainer for a session or two to help you with your weight training and flexibility training. Then you'll have the confidence to branch out on your own.
  • Set aside a specific time each day to exercise and put it in your planner.
  • Set short-term goals. Try targeting a specific event, such as a road race or a walk-for-charity, to participate in—this can help keep you motivated.
  • Reward yourself for achieving short-term goals, e.g., with new workout gear or a heart rate monitor.