Every year, countless individuals — including many from within the U of A community — make new year’s resolutions focused on health and fitness. However, the spark of motivation that accompanies the start of a new year often causes people to push too hard, too fast, setting overly ambitious goals that are abandoned by the time February arrives.

Michael Kennedy, a Clinical Exercise Physiologist and Associate Professor in the Faculty of Kinesiology, Sport, and Recreation, shares his expertise and tips for success if you’re looking to build a sustainable exercise routine that lasts all through the year.

Start by establishing your baseline 

Before you make an exercise plan, Kennedy explains, it’s important to assess where you’re starting from. A reasonable fitness goal for someone who is completely sedentary will be very different than for someone who already regularly incorporates physical activity into their daily routine. “Our bodies regulate how much capacity or function we have based on how much stress you impose,” explains Kennedy, which means different people will be able to handle a very different amount of intensity or overload dependent on what their activity has been like in the past.

One of the most accurate ways to figure out your baseline is through fitness testing, a service that the U of A offers through its Fitness Testing Services program, where Kennedy is director. It’s not just for elite athletes — regular individuals can sign up to have several health measures assessed, including cardiorespiratory or aerobic fitness, muscular strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, neuromuscular health and body composition.

“Testing gives you real evidence of your baseline fitness, and then through that feedback we can give you very clear recommendations on the intensity, duration, frequency and types of exercise that are appropriate for your training program.”

Follow the 15 per cent rule 

Kennedy covers several training principles in his Introduction to the Biological Aspects of Fitness to Health class, including the overload principle. Essentially, once you’ve figured out what your baseline is, you should avoid setting goals that have you exceeding it by more than 15 per cent. If you’re already running for 30 minutes a few times a week, for example, increase a few of your runs to 35 minutes per week.

For an individual who is completely sedentary, for example, “increasing to 10 or 15 minutes of physical activity a few times a week is a good start.” A training plan involving high-intensity, 90-minute fitness classes is a recipe for disaster, and likely injury.

And, Kennedy notes, you should keep the 15 per cent rule in mind when thinking of intensity as well. For example, if you regularly go for 30-minute walks, aiming to slowly increase the duration of your walks at the same pace is a reasonable and sustainable goal. Interested in a more high-intensity form of exercise for the new year, such as cross-country skiing or running? Don’t make the mistake of planning for the same duration as your lower-intensity workouts — instead, lower your amount of minutes as your body adjusts. 

“As I say to my students, intensity and duration are inversely related — as one goes up the other should go down.”

If you keep this in mind, your body will have the chance to adapt and keep pace with your resolution-fuelled enthusiasm.

Individualize your plan based on both capacity and interest

A common tip for those with fitness goals is to find a buddy to help motivate you to show up for your training sessions or exercise classes. While this may help with accountability, Kennedy warns that it can be a mistake in terms of sustainably reaching your health goals. “People are very social animals, so they want support,” he says, which often leads to people agreeing to accompany a friend to a workout class that’s too intense for them. “The training principle associated with that is individualization — what’s good for you is not necessarily good for me.”   

Kennedy also recommends finding activities you actually enjoy, rather than what you think might be the most effective, when designing your fitness plan. “Don’t do things that are good for you but that you absolutely hate — that’s not going to lead to long-term changes in your lifestyle and health-related fitness.”

Those who far prefer venturing outdoors over sweating in a gym can do so year-round, even in our northern climate; simply keep in mind that “cold is a major physical stressor,” says Kennedy.

“Spend the money and the time to dress appropriately, cover your mouth and cover your skin, because those two things can really change your nervous system and how it’s responding to your lung function and body temperature.”

Assess your schedule — and be realistic

While it may seem obvious, keep in mind that it’s also crucial to consider what your current weeks look like when planning a fitness program. “Any program is not worth the screen or paper it’s written on if it can’t fit into your actual life schedule,” says Kennedy. 

He recommends taking a look at an average week in your life and breaking it into two-hour blocks, spotting where there are windows of leisure time. Those are the opportunities to fit in physical activity — creating an idealistic plan and then trying to shoehorn it into your schedule where it simply doesn’t fit won’t lead to long-term success.

Know how to identify symptoms that you’re pushing too hard 

It’s normal to feel sore after a workout, especially if you’re pushing yourself, but how do you know when you may be taking things too far? According to Kennedy, a good rule of thumb is that if you’ve taken over-the-counter medications such as Advil or Tylenol to reduce subjective muscle soreness that is still lasting over 72 hours, “you’ve probably gone too hard.”

And don’t be tempted to ‘tough it out’ — “one of the things that can happen with severe muscle soreness is a leakage of proteins into the blood, and if too much leaks out this can be really hard on your kidneys.” 

Beyond muscle soreness, other physical signs of what Kennedy refers to as “overreaching” include a racing heart when you are trying to fall asleep, dry mouth, restless sleep, cravings, an increase in daytime drowsiness and mood disturbances (feeling grumpy or feeling flat). 

What: Bomber Fitness

Where: Needham, Massachusetts

An exercise science major at IC, Woodilla was working for a medical fitness facility in Boston when she was furloughed during the COVID pandemic. While looking for work, she came across PEX Health and Fitness, which provides a collaborative workspace for fitness and healthcare professionals, providing them with a facility and machines while covering the overhead costs. That gave her the idea (and provided the support necessary) to start Bomber Fitness, operating out of a three-story facility that she shares with other wellness practitioners.

Woodilla, who describes herself as “a guide helping clients up the mountain,” focuses her personal training on clients who have reached the end of their insurance-approved physical therapy. Many of these clients have a physical disability.

“Often, when someone recovering from an injury or dealing with a medical condition sees their results plateau in physical therapy, insurance will stop covering it,” she said. “But those individuals may have a disability that requires constant work, and they need a safe space where they can meet their fitness and wellness goals.”

Woodilla was inspired to work with that population after interning at Chapter 126 Sports & Fitness, an adaptive sports and fitness facility in Bristol, Connecticut, during her final semester at Ithaca.

“My time at Ithaca, both in the classroom and in my work in the Wellness Clinic, instilled a lot of great morals in me,” she said. “I believe everyone deserves of a place where they can explore their limits safely.”

No two health and wellness journeys are alike, so perhaps fittingly, no two journeys towards owning a gym or wellness center are the same either. But as these stories show, Ithaca alumni are making their mark in the fitness industry and ensuring their clients are living their best lives.

Adding just a few minutes of exercise per day could impact a person’s life expectancy, a new study has found.

Combined with an extra 24 minutes of sleep and small improvements to diet quality, those daily changes could add up to several additional years of life. 

The research is one of two studies published this week that examine how small adjustments to day-to-day movement, sleep and diet are associated with substantial health improvements.

Sleep, physical activity and diet study

The study, published in eClinicalMedicine, followed up a group of people eight years after they signed up for UK Biobank, a massive project that collected data on demographics, health and lifestyle in the early 2000s.

The team of researchers, led by Nicholas Koemel of the University of Sydney, fitted 59,078 people with trackers to monitor their exercise and sleep patterns for a week.

They also rated the participants’ self-reported diet at the time they signed up for UK Biobank to come up with a score out of 100.

According to the researchers, the study is the first of its kind to investigate the minimum combined doses of device-measured sleep and physical activity, alongside a comprehensive dietary score. 

“We were aiming to look at the interconnection between sleep, physical activity, and diet; and our lifespan — which is the number of years that we live — and our healthspan, that’s essentially the number of years we live free from chronic disease,” Dr Koemel said.

The research found that small improvements in all three areas made gains in both lifespan and healthspan.

The study found that improvement of life expectancy by one year when participants added:

• just five extra minutes of sleep per day,  plus
• just under two minutes per day of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity, and 
• an extra half serving of vegetables.

“One of the core findings from our study was that realistic improvements, these modest tiny tweaks across multiple behaviours, the sleep, physical activity, and diet, were able to create meaningful improvements in our lifespan and healthspan,” Dr Koemel said. 

While these baby steps could help, overall the  study found that the “optimal combination” of the three categories correlated with an additional nine years of life expectancy was:

• seven to eight hours of sleep, 
• just over 40 minutes of moderate exercise per day, 
• and a healthy diet.

Moira Junge, an adjunct clinical professor and health psychologist at Monash University, praised the studies and said looking at the combination of sleep, exercise and diet over the long term is crucial in longevity research.

“We absolutely need to put it together, and research like this is proof that even small changes can make a really big difference to your health and wellbeing,” Dr Junge said.

Cutting sitting by half hour helps with life expectancy

The second study, published in The Lancet, examined participants who had low activity levels and spent hours sitting throughout the day. 

Data from more than 135,000 adults across Norway, Sweden and the United States, combined with data from the UK Biobank examined the impact of daily physical activity and reductions in sedentary behaviours on mortality. 

The researchers found a nine per cent reduction in mortality risk when those sitting for eight or more hours a day reduced their sitting time by 30 minutes. 

Sedentary behaviour has previously been linked to higher rates of chronic health conditions, such as diabetes, colon cancer and cardiovascular diseases, prompting some claims that “sitting is the new smoking”.

The study also found that increasing physical activity by just five minutes a day could have a significant health impact, especially for minimally active people. 

Increasing from one minute to six minutes of exercise per day was associated with an approximately 30 per cent reduction in mortality risk. Those who increased activity from one minute to 11 minutes per day saw an approximate 42 per cent reduction in mortality risk.

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In 2022, a reported four in 10 Australian adults (aged 18–64) were insufficiently physically active: not meeting the recommended 150–300 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity across five or more days per week. 

“In reality, there’s always going to be people who don’t meet the guidelines,” said Melody Ding, a professor of public health at University of Sydney who co-led the study.

“It tells us in terms of the benefits of physical activity, that we don’t need to get everybody to do so much. This micro-dosing concept, especially for those who are inactive, could make a huge difference in terms of health outcomes,” she said.

Something better than nothing

Dr Junge hoped the study findings could help people feel positive health outcomes are achievable. 

“I think that when people can feel like they’ve got mastery over something then they’re more likely to change their behaviour and more likely to have motivation to change. Health is a confidence game,” she said. 

Lauren Ball, a professor of community health and wellbeing at University of Queensland, said the two new studies reconfirm the importance of diet, physical activity and sleep for overall health and wellbeing. 

“The notion that modest increases in physical activity is beneficial is also supported by other studies, suggesting that doing something is always better than nothing,” she said. 

“The results also support behaviour change theories that suggest that improving one aspect of health behaviour, such as eating well, may increase motivation or self-efficacy for other health behaviours, such as being physically active. 

‘Not a silver bullet’

While these numbers might be inspiring for some, Dr Koemel said they were not a “silver bullet”.

“It’s something that’s easy to accidentally take away from this; that maybe we only need to do one minute of exercise, and that’s not the case,” he said. 

“We still have physical guidelines, and those are there for a reason. This is really about helping us go that extra step, and ask what we would need to do to take the first step in the right direction.” 

The studies found that mortality improvements were most significant in participants who were inactive.

But Dr Ding said there was a “saturation point”.

“For example, in this study our data has shown that for those who are already doing 30 or 40 minutes per day; the active people who are meeting the guidelines, adding another five minutes, you don’t really see visible change.”

Despite this, Dr Koemel said looking at small daily changes across sedentary behaviours, sleep, diet and physical activity could have positive impacts more widely.

“We want to try to create opportunities where everybody can make change. The idea that we need to make these massive overhauls; wake up and and run a marathon or go to the gym every day of the week, that might not necessarily be the best starting place,” he said.