In the video 23 and 1/2 hours Dr. Mike Evans answers the old question "What is the single best thing we can do for our health" in a completely new way. Dr. Mike Evans is founder of the Health Design Lab at the Li Ka Shing Knowledge Institute, an Associate Professor of Family Medicine and Public Health at the University of Toronto, and a staff physician at St. Michael's Hospital.
What single intervention has the biggest return on investment? What’s the medicine? The biggest return on investment comes from walking, not triathlons. Take a moment and think about your typical day, couching, sitting at working, sleeping. Dr. Evans shows evidence that being active 30 minutes a day, maybe an hour will provide the largest return on investment in regards to your health.
Dr. Evans goes on to mentions the research of Dr. Steven Blair, an exercise scientist. Dr. Blair has been researching the health benefits of physical activity for more than 25 years, first at the Cooper Institute in Dallas and currently at the University of South Carolina’s Arnold School of Public Health. He is a former president of the American College of Sports Medicine.
Dr. Blair answered the following question in a New York Times interview regarding Power of Everyday Activity:
Q: How much exercise does a person have to do for optimal health?
A: Thirty minutes of moderate intensity exercise on five or more days of the week is really the bedrock dose. The fitness level associated with that dose effectively yields a 50 percent reduction in mortality risk. If you do more than the recommended levels by doing, say, 60 minutes of brisk walking or 45 minutes of jogging, you get another 10 percent to 15 percent reduction in mortality risk. This information comes from our research using data from the Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study, which has been running for 27 years, giving us ample opportunities to examine the impact that physical activity, diet and other lifestyle factors have on mortality.
Q: Does exercising less than 30 minutes, five days a week, provide benefits?
A: Yes. Our most recent research suggests that you can accrue benefits even if you don’t get the recommended dose. We just completed a five-year study involving a group of sedentary postmenopausal women with moderately high blood pressure who were tested at different levels of exercise. Even the women who got only half the recommended dose showed some significant physiological signs of improved health.
Q: What about minimal activity?
A: We are currently looking at what happens at the lowest end of the exercise spectrum — when you’re sitting or lying around and doing only minimal activities of daily living, something that’s increasingly common, even among individuals who exercise regularly. In fact, we know from national surveys that the percentage of adults who report doing regular exercise has remained about the same over the past 25 years, as has average daily calorie intake.
Walkingis man's best medicine. - Hippocrates
If exercise is medicine what’s the dose?
According to the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans the dose is:
Children and Adolescents (aged 6–17)
- Children and adolescents should do 1 hour (60 minutes) or more of physical activity every day.
- Most of the 1 hour or more a day should be either moderate- or vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity.
- As part of their daily physical activity, children and adolescents should do vigorous-intensity activity on at least 3 days per week. They also should do muscle-strengthening and bone-strengthening activity on at least 3 days per week.
Adults (aged 18–64)
- Adults should do 2 hours and 30 minutes a week of moderate-intensity, or 1 hour and 15 minutes (75 minutes) a week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity. Aerobic activity should be performed in episodes of at least 10 minutes, preferably spread throughout the week.
- Additional health benefits are provided by increasing to 5 hours (300 minutes) a week of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity, or 2 hours and 30 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both.
- Adults should also do muscle-strengthening activities that involve all major muscle groups performed on 2 or more days per week.
A New Year is upon us and New Year’s Resolutions will come and go as the days pass by but, Dr. Evans asks can you limit your sitting and sleeping to just 23 ½ hours per day?
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