How much exercise is enough to optimise the quality and quantity of our days? How much exercise do I need to do on a weekly basis to keep me healthy?
We know from the first blog in this trilogy that sedentary behaviour is not good for us (yes, that is an understatement ~ read more here).
Thanks to more amazing, methodical science, we can compare apples with oranges on the kinds of exercise people choose to do in terms of how much energy they use doing that activity (e.g. do you use more energy playing basketball or doing a HIIT session?), and ranking each activity into sedentary, light, moderate and vigorous categories depending on how much energy you consume while engaged in that activity.
This allows us to look at all the activities a person engages in throughout a day, and obtain an overall measure of their activity. Then it is also possible to identify a pattern regarding how often that person breaks their sedentary behaviours. Both of these elements impact the person's all cause mortality and thus their health status.
Back to the question we began with then. How much exercise, how often and how intense is going to keep us healthy? We now need to establish the frequency and duration of activity we put into our days.
From here the scientists did oodles of work to determine just how much light/moderate/vigorous activity was required at what frequency to lower our all cause mortality risk and keep us healthy.
Various governments from around the world have recognised that increased health risk means more dollars the government must shunt into the health portfolio to look after their deteriorating populace. Those governments have taken the data on sedentary behaviour and activity requirements for health, and they’ve put out their own public health recommendations on “Physical Activity and Exercise Guidelines”. They recognise that prevention is the key (and less drain on the national health budget). You can access the Australian version here.
The Australian ‘Physical activity and exercise guidelines for all Australians” (PAEGA) point out that activity guidelines need to be age specific. Here’s a copy of their summary of the science in terms of guidance for us regarding activity at different stages of our life:
From here I'd like to focus on the 18-64 non-pregnant group, as the plan gets tweaked for pregnant people and those 65 and over.
In summary, the Australian PAEGA recommends that most adults sit less, move more and do a minimum of five 30 minute sessions of exercise each week ~ with two of those sessions involving resistance work of some kind (i.e. a kind of exercise where you work your muscles to build strength and endurance).
More specifically, the Australian PAEGA calls for 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate activity or 1.25 to 2.5 hours of vigorous activity per week, including 2 sessions of resistance training. What does that look like?
Referring back to the Compendium of Physical Activity (see the last blog) here is an incomplete list of activities which fall into these categories and might tickle your fancy.
Some of this may seem familiar to you as I touched on the Australian PAEGA several years in a blog I wrote on exercise and how it can help you be healthier (read more here). In that exercise I quoted Robert Butler, and I can't resist doing so again here ~
So true. However, the research we've touched on in this trilogy of blogs takes that idea one step further. Yes we need to get our cardiovascular system revved up regularly and work to keep our musculoskeletal system strong. However, we now know we also need to reduce the time we spend engaged in sedentary behaviours AND break that sedentary time up with regular activity breaks. These two last elements are vital to optimise both our health status and the number of days we are blessed to enjoy.
The nice thing is each of us are able to choose what kinds of activity we introduce to our own personal plans. Just remember to tick the 2.5 to 5 hours of moderate activity or 1.25 to 2.5 hours of vigorous activity per week, including 2 sessions of resistance training box.
Many people have chosen to climb onto the 10,000 Steps bandwagon to achieve this. I wanted to delve into the 10,000 Steps movement to determine whether it does tick the boxes on our exercise requirements. I'll cover what I discovered in my next blog.