Fitness
Exercise and physical activity: The cornerstones of a healthy life – Businessday NG
Lisa, a 35-year-old graphic designer, had always been averse to exercise. Her job required long hours at a computer, and by the end of the day, she felt too exhausted to think about working out. Gradually, she noticed weight gain, frequent fatigue, and occasional back pain. Her wake-up call came during a routine health check-up when her doctor warned her about high cholesterol and the risk of developing diabetes. Determined to take control of her health, Lisa embarked on a journey to integrate exercise and physical activity into her life.
The Importance of Exercise and Physical Activity
Regular exercise and physical activity are crucial for maintaining overall health and well-being. They offer numerous benefits:
1. Weight Management: Exercise helps burn calories and build muscle, aiding in weight loss and preventing obesity. Maintaining a healthy weight reduces the risk of numerous diseases.
2. Cardiovascular Health: Physical activity strengthens the heart, improves circulation, and lowers blood pressure. It reduces the risk of heart disease, stroke, and other cardiovascular conditions.
3. Mental Health: Exercise releases endorphins, which enhance mood and reduce stress, anxiety, and depression. It also improves sleep quality and cognitive function.
4. Muscle and Bone Strength: Weight-bearing exercises and strength training build muscle and increase bone density, preventing osteoporosis and reducing the risk of fractures.
5. Longevity: Regular physical activity is associated with a longer lifespan and a higher quality of life in older age.
Read also: Physical health and coping with anxiety
Lisa realized that incorporating exercise into her routine could address her health issues and enhance her overall quality of life.
There are various types of exercises, each offering unique benefits. Incorporating a mix of these can help achieve overall fitness:
• Aerobic Exercise: Also known as cardio, aerobic exercises increase heart rate and improve cardiovascular endurance. Examples include walking, running, cycling, swimming, and dancing. These activities help burn calories and improve heart health.
• Strength Training: These exercises build muscle strength and endurance. Using weights, resistance bands, or body weight exercises like push-ups and squats can help. Strength training boosts metabolism, aids in weight loss, and improves muscle and bone health.
•Flexibility Exercises: Stretching and activities like yoga and Pilates enhance flexibility, improve range of motion, and reduce the risk of injury. They also help in muscle recovery and relaxation.
•Balance Exercises: Balance training, such as tai chi or specific balance-focused workouts, improves stability and coordination, reducing the risk of falls, especially in older adults.
Lisa started her journey with walking, gradually incorporating strength training and yoga into her routine. This variety kept her motivated and addressed different aspects of her fitness.
Several factors influence one’s ability to engage in regular exercise:
1. Time Constraints: Busy schedules can make it challenging to find time for exercise. However, short, consistent workouts can be effective. Even 30 minutes a day can significantly impact health.
2. Access to Facilities: Access to gyms, parks, or recreational areas can affect one’s ability to exercise. Home workouts and online resources can be valuable alternatives.
3. Motivation: Staying motivated can be difficult, especially when starting. Setting realistic goals, tracking progress, and finding enjoyable activities can help maintain motivation.
4. Physical Limitations: Health conditions or injuries can limit the ability to perform certain exercises. Consulting a healthcare professional or fitness trainer can help tailor a safe and effective workout plan.
5. Support System: Having a supportive environment, whether from family, friends, or fitness groups, can encourage regular exercise.
Lisa faced time constraints due to her job but realized that prioritising short, consistent workouts was manageable. She also found motivation through setting goals and tracking her progress.
A sustainable exercise routine involves setting realistic goals, finding enjoyable activities, and gradually increasing intensity. Here are steps to create an effective routine:
1. Set Clear Goals: Define what you want to achieve, whether it’s weight loss, improved fitness, or better mental health. Setting specific, measurable goals helps track progress.
2. Start Slow: Begin with activities that match your current fitness level. Gradually increase the duration and intensity to avoid injury and build endurance.
3. Incorporate Variety: Mix different types of exercises to keep things interesting and address various fitness components. This also prevents overuse injuries.
4. Schedule Workouts: Treat exercise like any other important appointment. Schedule it into your day and stick to it.
5. Stay Consistent: Consistency is key to seeing results. Aim for at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week, as recommended by health guidelines.
6. Listen to Your Body: Pay attention to how your body responds. Rest and recover when needed to prevent burnout and injury.
Lisa created a balanced routine that included walking, strength training, and yoga. She scheduled her workouts in the morning to start her day on a positive note and found joy in tracking her progress.
Inactivity can have serious consequences for health such as:
Increased Risk of Chronic Diseases: Sedentary behaviour is linked to a higher risk of heart disease, diabetes, and certain cancers.
Weight Gain: Lack of physical activity can lead to weight gain and obesity, further increasing the risk of health issues.
Mental Health Decline: Inactivity is associated with higher levels of stress, anxiety, and depression. Exercise helps release endorphins, improving mood and mental health.
Reduced Mobility and Flexibility: Inactivity can lead to muscle stiffness, joint pain, and decreased flexibility, impacting daily activities and increasing the risk of falls.
Lisa’s sedentary lifestyle had contributed to her health problems. By becoming more active, she not only addressed her immediate health concerns but also laid the foundation for long-term well-being.
Lisa’s transformation highlights the profound impact of exercise and physical activity on overall health. Regular exercise is essential for physical, mental, and emotional well-being. By setting realistic goals, incorporating variety, and staying consistent, anyone can make exercise a sustainable part of their life.
Exercise is not just about preventing disease; it’s about enhancing the quality of life and ensuring longevity. Prioritise physical activity today to reap the benefits of a healthier, more vibrant future.
People with high cardiorespiratory fitness were 36% less likely to experience depression and 39% less likely to develop dementia than those with low cardiorespiratory fitness. Even small improvements in fitness were linked to a lower risk. Experts believe that exercise’s ability to boost blood flow to the brain, reduce bodywide inflammation, and improve stress regulation may explain the connection.
Fitness
These 20-Minute Burpee Workouts Replaced His Entire Gym Routine – and Transformed His Physique
While many swear by them, most people see burpees as a form of punishment – usually dished out drill sergeant-style by overzealous bootcamp PTs. Often the final blow in an already brutal workout, burpees are designed to test cardiovascular fitness, muscular endurance and mental grit. Love them or loathe them, they deliver every time.
For Max Edwards – aka Busy Dad Training on YouTube – they became a simple but highly effective way to stay fit and lean during lockdown. Once a committed powerlifter, spending upwards of 80 minutes a day in the gym, he was forced to overhaul his approach due to fatherhood, lockdown and a schedule that no longer allowed for long, structured lifting sessions.
‘Even though I was putting in hours and hours into the gym and even though my physique was pretty good, I wasn’t becoming truly excellent at any physical discipline,’ he explained in a YouTube video.
‘I loved the intentionality of training,’ says Edwards. ‘The fact that every session has a point, every rep in every set is helping you get towards a training goal, and I loved that there was a clear way of gauging progression – feeling like I was developing competence and moving towards mastery.’
Why He Walked Away From Powerlifting
Despite that structure, Edwards began to question whether powerlifting was sustainable long-term.
‘My sessions were very taxing on my central nervous system. I was exhausted between sessions. It felt as if I needed at least nine hours of sleep each night just to function.’
He also noted that his appetite was consistently high.
But the biggest drawback was time.
‘I could not justify taking 80 minutes a day away from my family for what felt like a self-centred pursuit,’ he says.
A Simpler Approach That Stuck
‘Over the course of that year I fixed my relationship with alcohol and I developed, for the first time in my adult life, a relationship with physical training,’ says Edwards.
With limited time and no access to equipment, he turned to burpees. Just two variations, four times a week, with each session lasting 20 minutes.
‘My approach in each workout was very simple. On a six-count training day I would do as many six-counts as I possibly could within 20 minutes. On a Navy Seal training day I would do as many Navy Seal burpees as I could within 20 minutes – then in the next workout I would simply try to beat the number I had managed previously.’
This style of training is known as AMRAP – as many reps (or rounds) as possible.
The Results
Edwards initially saw the routine as nothing more than a six-month stopgap to stay in shape. But that quickly changed.
‘I remember catching sight of myself in the mirror one morning and I was utterly baffled by the man I saw looking back at me.’
He found himself in the best shape of his life. His energy levels improved, his resting heart rate dropped and his physique changed in ways that powerlifting hadn’t quite delivered.
‘It has been five years since I have set foot in a gym,’ he says. ‘That six-month training practice has become the defining training practice of my life – and for five years I have trained for no more than 80 minutes per week.’
The Burpee Workouts
1/ 6-Count Burpees
20-minute AMRAP, twice a week
How to do them:
- Start standing, feet shoulder-width apart
- Crouch down and place your hands on the floor (count 1)
- Jump your feet back into a high plank (count 2)
- Lower into the bottom of a push-up (count 3)
- Push back up to plank (count 4)
- Jump your feet forward to your hands (count 5)
- Stand up straight (count 6)
20-minute AMRAP, twice a week
How to do them:
- Start standing, feet shoulder-width apart
- Crouch down and place your hands on the floor
- Jump your feet back into a high plank
- Perform a push-up (chest to floor)
- At the top, bring your right knee to your right elbow, then return
- Perform another push-up
- Bring your left knee to your left elbow, then return
- Perform a third push-up
- Jump your feet forward
- Stand or jump to finish
Kate is a fitness writer for Men’s Health UK where she contributes regular workouts, training tips and nutrition guides. She has a post graduate diploma in Sports Performance Nutrition and before joining Men’s Health she was a nutritionist, fitness writer and personal trainer with over 5k hours coaching on the gym floor. Kate has a keen interest in volunteering for animal shelters and when she isn’t lifting weights in her garden, she can be found walking her rescue dog.
You check your smartwatch after a run. Your fitness score has dropped. You’ve burnt hardly any calories. Your recovery score is really low. It’s telling you to take the next 72 hours off exercise.
The worst bit? The whole run felt amazing.
So why is your watch telling you the opposite?
Ultimately, it’s because smartwatches and other fitness trackers aren’t always accurate.
Smartwatches can shape how you exercise
Using wearable fitness technology, such as smartwatches, has been one of the top fitness trends for close to a decade. Millions of people around the world use them daily.
These devices shape how people think about health and exercise. For example, they provide data about how many calories you’ve burnt, how fit you are, how recovered you are after exercise, and whether you’re ready to exercise again.
But your smartwatch doesn’t measure most of these metrics directly. Instead, many common metrics are estimates. In other words, they’re not as accurate as you might think.
1. Calories burned
Calorie tracking is one of the most popular features on smartwatches. However, the accuracy leaves a lot to be desired.
Wearable devices can under- or overestimate energy expenditure (often expressed as calories burned) by more than 20 per cent. These errors also vary between activities. For example, strength training, cycling and high-intensity interval training can lead to even larger errors.
This matters because people often use these numbers to guide how much they eat.
For example, if your watch overestimates calories burned, you might think you need to eat more food than you really need, which could result in weight gain. Conversely, if your watch underestimates calories burned, it could lead you to under-eat, negatively impacting your exercise performance.
2. Step counts
Step counts are a great way to measure general physical activity, but wearables don’t capture them perfectly.
Smartwatches can under-count steps by about 10 per cent under normal exercise conditions. Activities such as pushing a pram, carrying weights, or walking with limited arm swing likely make step counts less accurate, as smartwatches rely on arm movement to register steps.
For most people, this isn’t a major problem, and step counts are still useful for tracking general activity levels. But view them as a guide, rather than a precise measure.
3. Heart rate
Smartwatches estimate your heart rate using sensors that measure changes in blood flow through the veins in your wrist.
This method is accurate at rest or low intensities, but gets less accurate as you increase exercise intensity.
Arm movement, sweat, skin tone and how tightly you wear the watch can also impact the heart rate measure it spits out. This means the accuracy can vary between people.
This can be problematic for people who use heart rate zones to guide their training, as small errors can lead to training at the wrong intensity.
4. Sleep tracking
Almost every smartwatch on the market gives you a “sleep score” and breaks your night into stages of light, deep and REM sleep.
The gold standard for measuring sleep is polysomnography. This is a lab-based test that records brain activity. But smartwatches estimate sleep using movement and heart rate.
This means they can detect when you’re asleep or awake reasonably well. But they are much less accurate at identifying sleep stages.
So even if your watch says you had “poor deep sleep”, this may not be the case.
5. Recovery scores
Most smartwatches track heart rate variability and use this, with your sleep score, to create a “readiness” or “recovery” score.
Heart rate variability reflects how your body responds to stress. In the lab it is measured using an electrocardiogram. But smartwatches estimate it using wrist-based sensors, which are much more prone to measurement errors.
This means most recovery metrics are based on two inaccurate measures (heart rate variability and sleep quality). This results in a metric that may not meaningfully reflect your recovery.
As a result, if your watch says you’re not recovered, you might skip training — even if you feel good (and are actually good to go).
6. VO₂max
Most devices estimate your VO₂max — which indicates your maximal fitness. It’s the maximum amount of oxygen your body can use during exercise.
The best way to measure VO₂max involves wearing a mask to analyse the amount of oxygen you breathe in and out, to determine how much oxygen you’re using to create energy.
But your watch cannot measure oxygen use. It estimates it based on your heart rate and movement.
But smartwatches tend to overestimate VO₂max in less active people and underestimate VO₂max in fitter ones.
This means the number on your watch may not reflect your true fitness.
What should you do?
While the data from your smartwatch is prone to errors, that doesn’t mean it is completely worthless.
These devices still offer a way to help you track general trends over time, but you should not pay attention to daily fluctuations or specific numbers.
It’s also important you pay attention to how you feel, how you perform and how you recover. This is likely to give you even more insight than what your smartwatch says.
Hunter Bennett is a lecturer in exercise science at Adelaide University. This piece first appeared on The Conversation.
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