Fitness

Are there benefits to exercising while taking new diet drugs? — Harvard Gazette

Published

11 months ago

January 17, 2025

Are there benefits to exercising while taking new diet drugs? — Harvard Gazette

New diet drugs are making it easier to lose weight. So does that mean we can stop exercising? Health experts say no. There is a long list of upsides to going for a walk or hitting the gym, and weight loss isn’t necessarily at the top.

“Exercise is good for everything from cognition and mental health benefits such as preventing neurocognitive disorders like Alzheimer’s disease to cardiovascular benefits like preventing mortality from cardiovascular disease, maintaining vascular function, and improving lung strength and lung function,” said Christina Dieli-Conwright, an associate professor in the Department of Nutrition at the T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

“Exercising regularly can even benefit the gastrointestinal system, like gut motility, digestion and the gut microbiome. … Depression, anxiety, sleep, fatigue, pain — I can’t think of a body system that is not benefited by exercise,” she added.

But, while exercise can help in losing weight, it isn’t a magic bullet, she said.

“Historically speaking, the thought behind exercise and weight loss is a little bit erroneous. Exercise alone does not typically put an individual into enough of a caloric deficit to cause weight loss,” she said.

Why? For starters consider that exercise, on average, can burn from 200 to 700 calories an hour, while consuming that many calories can be done in minutes.

And most of us appear to be poor at keeping track of what we’re taking in vs. what we’re burning.

According to the Centers for Disease Control, more than 73 percent of Americans are overweight or obese. At the same time, almost half of all adults met activity guidelines for aerobic physical activity during the period of a year, and nearly a quarter met guidelines for both aerobic and muscle-strengthening activity.

7 to 15 Hours of exercise a week significantly lowers cancer risk, according to 2019 study

Medical experts say both exercise and maintaining a healthy weight are important components of promoting overall health and longevity.

“Because the effects of weight loss on diabetes control and risk of diabetes is stronger than for exercise, but for other things like heart disease and living longer — they look like they’re about equivalent,” said I-Min Lee, a professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Chan School and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School.

In 2019, Lee helped author a study on physical activity and cancer risk that showed that seven to 15 hours of exercise a week can significantly lower one’s risk of seven types of cancer. That benefit decreases with an overweight BMI, but still shows an improved risk for six cancers: colon, breast, kidney, myeloma, liver, and non-Hodgkin lymphoma.

“Depression, anxiety, sleep, fatigue, pain — I can’t think of a body system that is not benefited by exercise.” Christina Dieli-Conwright, T.H. Chan School of Public Health

Lee advises those who are looking to begin an exercise regimen to start small.

“That way you get a little bit of benefit,” she said, “and it’s also very encouraging, because if it’s an amount that’s doable, and you succeed, it might make you want to do more.”

And doing more is good for everyone, she said. A good strategy, according to Lee, is to try to add 10 minutes to your routine — whatever it may be. If you walk for 20 minutes a day, go for 30 until you meet or exceed the recommended 150 minutes of weekly exercise.

Edward Phillips, an assistant professor of physical medicine and rehabilitation at HMS, and founder and director of the Institute of Lifestyle Medicine at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital, agrees.

“If I ask someone how easily they think they could add a bottle of water in the morning or in the afternoon to combat dehydration, they’re going to say, ‘That’s not so hard.’ If they start doing that, and they also add in a five-minute walk after lunch, which is really healthy, and also easy to achieve, then when I check in with them three weeks later, they go, ‘I’m drinking more water. I feel better. And by the way, the five-minute walk turned into a 10-minute walk.’”

Phillips is also host of the WBUR podcast “Food, We Need to Talk,” covering health and fitness. He said when patients don’t see changes on the scale, they need tangible reasons to keep working out — and there are apparent reasons.

“People need a good story in order to make changes that would result in meaningful health changes,” he said. “Exercise allows you to be more functional. You can get out of a chair more easily. You can sit in the chair more easily. … Or when a friend says, ‘Let’s go downhill skiing this weekend,’ and you’re like, ‘I haven’t done that in years,’ you say. ‘I could try it, because I’ve been exercising.’”

Dieli-Conwright said it helps to do anything a couple of times a week that gets you out of breath.

“You’re going to get more bang for your buck if you do both aerobic and resistance exercise, though,” she said. “The reason is that aerobic exercise is going to tax the cardiorespiratory system more than resistance or weightlifting. That type of exercise is fantastic for muscle strength. But with both you are going to target glucose metabolism, which is going to be important for managing hyper- and hypoglycemia, diabetes management, things like that.”

She adds that it’s also important to interrupt sitting time or sedentary behaviors.

“Once an hour, get up for two to three minutes even, and just stand up and down and squat or take a two-minute little walk, and go up and down the stairs a couple of times. That can actually help to also manage glucose, which leads, again, back into diabetes risk,” she said.

But Dieli-Conwright emphasizes that creating an exercise habit is key.

“We all know that obesity is incredibly bad. It leads to so many different other co-morbid conditions, specifically heart disease and diabetes. However, there’s so much data that’s overlooked that supports the paradigm that I generally call, and others call, being fit and fat,” she said, essentially being overweight, yet metabolically healthy.

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Fitness

From Lifespan to ‘Health-span’: Use the New Year to Focus on Both Health and Fitness

Published

5 hours ago

December 24, 2025

Press Room

From Lifespan to ‘Health-span’: Use the New Year to Focus on Both Health and Fitness

Fitness encompasses cardiovascular endurance, strength training, and mobility/flexibility. These are non-negotiables for continuing to live throughout your later years with your independence and ability to move and socialize still intact.

Instead of thinking simply about living longer, let’s use the start of a new year to focus on getting healthier, so we live better. More than any other time each year, the New Year is a popular time to focus on a “fresh start.” Temporal landmarks like New Year’s Day, Mondays, birthdays and the change of seasons are standard starting lines for many of us when we have a goal to work toward and bad habits to break.

Science Says Fitness Matters (Even More than Weight)

A recent study published in the British Journal of Medicine, Cardiorespiratory Fitness, BMI, and Mortality: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis, shows that, regardless of body weight (obese, overweight or normal), fitness matters more for all-cause mortality. They measured the weight, BMI and fitness of six groups: normal weight-fit; normal weight-unfit; overweight-fit; overweight-unfit; obese-fit; and obese-unfit.

The analyses revealed that individuals classified as fit, regardless of their BMI, did not have a statistically significantly higher risk of cardiovascular disease or all-cause mortality compared to normal weight-fit people. At the same time, all unfit groups across different BMI categories exhibited a two- to threefold higher risk of cardiovascular disease and all-cause mortality compared to their regular weight-fit counterparts.

About Body Mass Index (BMI)

Now, you may be saying, “But BMI is flawed!” Sure. BMI is not the best indicator for distinguishing normal weight, overweight and obesity because it is simply a height-to-weight ratio that does not account for differences in body fat/muscle composition, age, sex or other factors. Before you discredit this entire study because of the BMI issue, remember that it measured fitness levels among people of different sizes. Some had more muscle and were considered fit in the overweight/obese group, while others were deemed unfit in the normal weight group. Still, BMI helps place people of differing sizes (height and weight groups) and focuses on measuring each group’s fitness. In the end, fitness matters more than BMI, so the goal is to exercise, get in shape, build muscle and lose fat.

Set Your Training Goals to Be Long-Term

It is fine to have short-term, specific training goals, such as strength gains and endurance times, or weight gain or weight loss. However, start this year with a 10-year fitness focus, as what you do in your 40s-50s will determine how you live in your 60s-70s. Always think 10 years ahead, no matter what your age, because what you gain today and maintain tomorrow is needed to continue to live independently for a few more generations in your family’s lineage. You can focus on longevity and optimal performance for your fitness and health goals at the same time by maintaining a consistent activity level and healthful nutrition, sleep and recovery.

Try This Goal: Make Annual Physical and Blood Screening Appointments

If you have not been to a doctor in a while, set an appointment in January, and get into the habit of annual health and wellness screenings. Treat annual physicals with the doctor as opportunities to PR (personal record) common blood work results, such as cholesterol, triglycerides, blood sugar, body weight and blood pressure. These are just the basics to help you assess how to adjust your sleep, nutrition, physical activity and stress management. These meetings are also quite satisfying when you achieve solid results that show health and wellness.

Don’t Give Up

While a large portion of us (nearly half of Americans) will create a New Year’s resolution, only about 9%-10% will achieve their goals. After a stressful holiday season, we are typically burned out in January. This may not be the best time to start a lifestyle change, complete with quitting bad habits (over-eating, smoking, drinking) and starting new healthy habits (gym membership, diet, etc.).

Instead, use the first few weeks of January to focus on stress mitigation and recovery. This should include building easy habits of walking every day, stretching, taking deep breaths and simply not overeating. This is a great way to move into a new fitness focus. Then, when feeling back to normal, focus a little harder, with more intensity, duration of training, and specificity to your fitness and health goals.

There are many ways to expand your “health-span.” Check out these options and get consistent with any or all of them:

Final Advice

If you want to get started on a focused health and wellness goal of being able to do physical activities, stay social and be independent, start with the basics of walking and stretching daily for a month. The following month, add calisthenics such as squats, lunges, push-ups and the plank pose. The following month, add weights such as dumbbells or kettlebells, or suspension trainers such as the TRX.

This steady progression helps you ease into fitness habits gently and adds a new component each month to keep it interesting. To achieve results with lifelong wellness goals, you need to keep endurance, strength and mobility/flexibility as primary focuses. Stability, durability, balance, speed and agility can also be developed once you have built the foundation. This is the beauty of long-term goals. Focus on doing something each day, being disciplined about eating and drinking healthfully, and learning stress-mitigation techniques such as breathing to take into your next decade on this planet.

There are dozens of these types of articles at the Military.com Fitness Section. Check them out for ideas on specific ways to train.

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Fitness

Exercise ‘snacks’ can keep your fitness on track when time is tight – try these 3 today

Published

17 hours ago

December 23, 2025

Press Room

Exercise ‘snacks’ can keep your fitness on track when time is tight – try these 3 today

December is great for many things – socialising, scoffing, falling out with relatives – but sticking to a training schedule is not one of them.

Heading out the door on Christmas morning for a two-hour long run is likely to put anyone on the naughty list, while it takes a dedicated runner indeed to spend part of the festive period running loops of the track.

What the mere mortal needs is exercise “snacks”. These can be enjoyed/endured alongside the carb-based variety and snuck in to even the busiest Christmas schedule.

A review in Sports Medicine and Health Research confirmed that regular, short bursts of physical activity throughout the day improved cardiovascular respiratory fitness, increased fat oxidation and polished off blood sugar levels after eating.

Vigorous intermittent exercises, such as sprints, were good for building muscle strength. Meanwhile, 10-minute resistance training sessions were found to be particularly beneficial to older people. The researchers concluded that exercise snacks could be a viable alternative to longer, less frequent sessions.

Cram in vigorous bouts of stair climbing for muscle strength, or one or two sub-10 minute morsels for muscle growth as an efficient alternative to meatier long sessions. Here’s some inspo below…

3 exercise snacks to gorge on

Try these simple workouts for results on the quick

For upper-body

Press-ups: 3 x 20 with a 30-sec rest between (b/w) reps

Bench dips: 3 x 15 with a 30-sec rest b/w reps

For lower-body

Bodyweight squats: 3 x 20 with 20-sec rest b/w reps

Wall sit: 2 x 90 secs with 1-min rest b/w reps

For cardio fitness

Burpees: 3 x 20 with 30-sec rest b/w reps

Skipping: 4mins consisting of 1min normal, 1min high knees, 1min normal, 1min high knees

Fitness

Study shows the antioxidants in this tea improve exercise recovery

Published

1 day ago

December 22, 2025

Press Room

Study shows the antioxidants in this tea improve exercise recovery

I love many different herbal teas just as much as I enjoy a good old-fashioned British cup of PG tips, Earl Grey, or Glengettie — a Welsh favorite from the rolling valleys where I was born. In an interesting study, researchers explored whether drinking green or matcha tea can improve sports performance and exercise recovery, and the results might have you reaching for a vibrant green drink. If you want to get straight to the results, the short answer is that drinking green and matcha tea can support hydration, body fat control, and exercise recovery. Still, it definitely won’t be a game-changer when it comes to your performance in the gym, on the court, or on the field.

Hydrating with tea

In a study published in Nutrition and Food Technology, researchers reviewed existing studies of athletes and active adults that focused solely on drinking tea — no pills or extracts. They revealed that green or matcha tea can help hydrate the body when consumed in normal amounts. Tea counts toward your daily water intake.

Antioxidants and recovery

The research highlighted how the widely-studied antioxidants in green and matcha tea can improve exercise recovery and help protect your cells from the stress associated with intense exercise. That said, the research shows that drinking tea won’t lead to faster or better strength gains, so it’s no silver bullet for helping you achieve your fitness goals. However, they also concluded that low-caffeine green tea could even improve sleep quality, which I would argue could potentially help you power through that workout if you’re getting better sleep the night before.

Linked to lower body fat

Interestingly, the study authors also concluded that drinking around two or three cups of green or matcha tea per day was associated with slightly lower body fat and improved body composition and fat burning. While the effects weren’t overly significant, they were noted in the research. Cup of tea, anyone?