Almost all of us, anywhere in the world, need to exercise more. It’s not something we don’t know, but there is good reason to remind people of the dangers of being inactive.
High blood pressure is a common global health issue that can often be deadly. More than a third of adults in the UAE suffer from high blood pressure – or hypertension – and a large percentage of people don’t even know it, which partially explains why it’s called a silent killer.
One in four men, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO), have the condition. It can lead to multiple health crises, including strokes, heart attacks and kidney disease. The more encouraging news is that the condition can be prevented or reduced by eating a sensible diet, maintaining a healthy weight and exercising regularly.
These lifestyle changes are often more difficult to accomplish on a long-term basis. But we can build healthy habits and exercise into our routines.
Let’s start by reminding ourselves of why we should all move more. The WHO recommends at least 150 minutes (about two and a half hours) of moderate exercise per week, but studies show that more than 80 per cent of adolescents and 27 per cent of adults globally fall short of this mark.
In the UAE, only one in five UAE school children achieve the recommended amount of physical activity. Sedentary lifestyles lead to chronic illnesses, including diabetes and heart disease and this is an issue parents need to take more seriously. More parents need to ensure that their children go out to play a sport for half an hour a day, at least.
At NYU Abu Dhabi (NYUAD) we encourage students to prioritise and engage in their well-being so they may flourish in academics as well as in their extracurricular activities. All our undergraduate students are required to take two physical and health education courses. The benefits are evident.
We’ve noticed a measurable improvement in more than just our students’ health and fitness thanks to a curriculum that focuses on the wider learning outcomes across four areas: physical activity, nutrition, mindfulness and sleep.
These are principles that we hope will stay with them for life. For starters, exercise does far more than help prevent disease. It triggers the release of endorphins, the body’s natural feel-good chemicals that can combat symptoms of anxiety and depression, which leads to improved mental clarity and focus.
Stressing the endocrine system spurs the body into regulating itself through better sleep and rest, to repair itself and grow new cells.
There are also many benefits of team sports, which offer a platform for social interaction and fostering a sense of belonging and community. This is especially important today, given the WHO reports a rise of over 25 per cent in depression and anxiety since 2020, affecting nearly a billion people globally.
The camaraderie of a group also counters loneliness, which is also on the rise and has been shown to be as damaging to physical health as smoking. Belonging to a team or a group provides a support system that can be invaluable – especially in a nation that hosts a diverse population, who all come from different backgrounds and are often away from family.
While exercising is a personal journey, there are steps that can help everyone.
The first is to reframe the language around exercise. Instead of focusing on weight loss as the sole motivation, there should be a celebration of the joy of movement.
People are advised to explore activities they genuinely enjoy – a brisk walk, a swim, a dance class or an outdoor game. Exercise is not solely for those seeking to lose weight. It should be a daily habit for everyone.
The usual advice is to start slowly and gradually increase intensity and duration. One should aim for at least 30 minutes of moderate intensity exercise most days of the week to get into a regular habit. Good habits are vital to success in any venture. Exercise can often have a positive effect on different aspects of life apart from physical fitness, whether work or relationships. People new to exercise will notice the increased energy they have, even at the workplace.
Group activities can add a layer of fun, so people of all ages could consider joining a local sports club or signing up for a community fitness event. There are many activities in Abu Dhabi that are accessible to people of all fitness levels and will appeal to those who are looking for alternatives to a gym workout.
Through Abu Dhabi Sports Council’s Abu Dhabi 360 initiative has a number of accessible runs or cycle rides such as the Al Qana Community Run and the MBZ Fun Ride. There are also a host of Active Parks initiatives and community events attached to the global sports events hosted in Abu Dhabi, such as the World Triathlon Championship Series and the UAE Tour.
My personal preference for a fun approach to fitness is to use the cycle facilities at Yas Marina Circuit, the Corniche and Hudayriyat Island, plus the increasing cycling infrastructure across the city. In Abu Dhabi, there are options for fitness workouts for everyone.
I would also recommend signing up to a challenge, which helps keep one accountable. Setting a goal and share it often makes a person more likely to succeed and deal with demotivation.
Remember also that we are talking about well-being. That might mean getting out into nature, watching a sunset at the beach or sitting by the mangroves for a sense of calm.
Breathing exercises too are especially effective. Apart from movement and calories burnt, a focus on feeling good internally is important. This can help refocus, quiet the mind and reduce stress – all of which are necessary to improve the quality of life, reduce hypertension, as well as the burden on healthcare systems around the world.
Reframing the conversation around health and well-being starts with recognising that every step counts. It’s not about drastic changes but about integrating movement into the day. The goal is not just to avoid getting sick, but to increase well-being and transform our lives.
Published: June 06, 2024, 7:00 AM
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome makes you extremely tired and affects your sleep quality. So, can exercising help to manage the symptoms? Let’s find out on World Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Awareness Day.
Exercise is not just meant to manage a healthy weight, but also to reduce stress, as well as to keep bones and joints in top shape. Some moves may also be recommended to manage health conditions such as osteoporosis, diabetes and hypertension. But what if you feel too tired to do any kind of physical activity? Chronic Fatigue Syndrome is a condition that leads to extreme fatigue. Even after resting, you will feel too tired to do anything. It also has an impact on the quality of your sleep and your ability to concentrate. So, is exercising the solution? On the occasion of World Chronic Fatigue Syndrome Awareness Day on May 12, we tell you how exercising may help people with this long-term condition.
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or Myalgic encephalomyelitis is a condition that can lead to extreme tiredness. It can affect anyone, including children. According to the UK’s National Health Service, this long-term condition can make you feel so tired that it can make daily activities like going to work or taking a shower difficult.
It can cause sleep problems, including insomnia. Sometimes, people with this condition sleep too much, and still feel like they have not slept properly. It can also lead to brain fog, and make it hard to think and concentrate properly. Due to disabling fatigue, which is unpredictable, it can disrupt personal, professional and social life of the person with this condition.
Physical activity may help to improve the Chronic Fatigue Syndrome symptoms along with muscle strength and cardiovascular endurance. But exercises should be done with supervision, according to The Royal Australian College of General Practitioners. Exercising with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome must be approached very carefully. “Gentle and well-paced physical activity can offer certain benefits if done correctly,” says physiotherapist Neha Gill.
Here are some of the benefits:
There are benefits of exercising, but it doesn’t mean you engage in high-intensity workouts or push through fatigue. Also, many people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome are prone to dizziness, especially while standing, as per the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. So, exercises that involve standing, especially without any support, should be avoided. Instead, try these exercises for Chronic Fatigue Syndrome:
You need to be extremely careful while engaging in physical activity if you have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Here are a few tips:
You need to be cautious while exercising with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The goal is to gently support your health without worsening the symptoms. High-impact exercises or strenuous workouts can trigger crashes in people with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. So, choose gentle moves and breathing instead. Talk to a doctor or physiotherapist before working out.
Related FAQs
There is no cure for chronic fatigue syndrome. But lifestyle changes, medication, and cognitive behavioral therapy and physical therapy may help to manage the symptoms.
Mildly impaired people with chronic fatigue syndrome may be able to go to work. However, careful planning and management of activities are needed.
Keeping your lower body strong and capable has many benefits, particularly for maintaining your mobility and independence into old age. Many of us also like having a muscular, toned lower body for the way it looks.
The good news is that whatever motivates you, you get both benefits, and this workout will improve strength and build lean muscle in your legs, all in just 20 minutes.
I recently witnessed an online melee as people debated the best way to perform a press-up: an exercise with an instruction booklet built into its name. Sure, there are nuances you can use to manipulate muscular engagement, but for the vast majority of people, simply pressing themselves away from the ground (kneeling or otherwise) will deliver most of the benefits.
This isn’t an isolated event either. Everywhere I look, people are seeking incremental health and fitness progress through (often expensive) hacks, shortcuts and supplements, all while leaving potentially huge gains on the table by overlooking the basics.
Regular sauna sessions in lieu of a good night’s sleep, a huge stack of pills where fruit and vegetables might suffice, and some new-fangled bosu ball exercise when a simple squat would deliver more bang for your buck.
I’m not saying these things are ineffective, but for the greatest impact on your health, you’re better off laying strong foundations first. Having interviewed some of the top researchers, coaches, trainers and athletes from across the fitness industry, I’ve identified the common denominators they all recommend for general good health.
From these, I have created six accessible, expert-led and actionable tips which you can use to become fitter than the majority of the population.
“Most of us have this mindset that more is better and we have to be absolutely perfect in everything,” says Sally Gunnell, former Olympic champion and founder of Life’s Hurdle. “But you can’t be perfect every day. That’s where exercise programmes and diets often go wrong.”
When people slip up and miss a day of their exercise plan, they often pack it all in. Failing to follow a diet’s strict rules regularly ends in a similar fate.
Gunnell likens this “all or nothing mindset” to getting a flat tyre, then slashing the other three. Instead, she recommends fixing the one that is broken by finding small ways to move your health and fitness in the right direction.
“If you miss a workout or overeat on one day, don’t throw the week away and say, ‘I’m going to start again on Monday’. Just go back to your normal [healthy] routine. Progress isn’t about perfection,” she says.
“I always think about red, amber and green days. Your green days are your good days, but often you might have a red day where you don’t feel like doing anything. On those days, is there one thing you can do that makes it an amber day?”
This might mean a short walk when you would otherwise have been scrolling on your phone, or a quick five minutes of movement (such as the short resistance training routine below) while taking a break from your desk.
A few minutes of effort might not seem significant enough to have an impact, but doing these activities regularly will quickly rack up compound interest for your fitness.
“It’s about being consistent, doing something when you can, and having a mindset where you’re not beating yourself up [if you don’t do everything perfectly],” Gunnell says. “That’s the key to long-term health and building it into your life.”
If we apply this to walking, step-based activity expert Dr Elroy Aguiar says the “ideal” baseline to hit for most health benefits is around 7,000-8,000 steps per day, with 20 to 30 minutes of walking at 100 to 130 steps per minute or faster.
However, he echoes the World Health Organisation’s sentiment that “every move counts towards better health”.
“If that means walking a little bit more quickly to your car, the train station or a bus stop, just to elevate your heart rate and your metabolic rate a little bit for those brief periods which you can accumulate throughout the day, those things count as well in terms of exercise,” Dr Aguiar says.
Broadly speaking, the body operates on a use it or lose it basis. If you do something regularly, it will adapt to do it better. If you stop doing something, it will gradually discard the strength, mobility and cardiorespiratory fitness required to do so. Therefore, if you want to be able to move freely, moving frequently is a non-negotiable.
Top strength coach Dan John identifies the five basic human movements as push, pull, hinge, squat and loaded carry.
Movement mechanics expert Ash Grossmann also highlights the importance of moving in all three planes of motion; sagittal, meaning up, down, forward and backward motions; frontal, meaning side-to-side actions such as bending; transverse, meaning twisting or rotational movements.
If you can cover these eight bases each week, whether that’s via strength training, pilates or any other activity you favour, your body is likely to feel more supple than most.
“We want to maintain as many movement options as possible, so that means moving as many joints as possible in as many directions as possible,” says Grossmann. “Doing things like side bends and rotations will all contribute to a body that feels limber and loose.”
Resistance training is the golden goose for health, fitness and longevity, offering an invariably cheaper entry fee and far greater return on investment than most biohacking options.
“In my opinion, the benefits of maintaining healthy muscle are highly underrated,” says Well To Lead founder Ollie Thompson, a trainer who specialises in longevity. “Consistent resistance exercise enhances metabolic function by improving insulin sensitivity, supports cardiovascular health by reducing blood pressure and inflammation, helps maintain hormonal balance to combat age-related decline, preserves bone density to reduce fracture risk and strengthens the immune system to help fight off disease.”
But resistance exercise doesn’t have to mean spending an hour in the gym every day.
Your muscles don’t know the difference between a dumbbell, barbell or bodyweight workout, they just recognise the need to overcome resistance. As long as an exercise is adequately challenging, it will prompt positive adaptations to strength and size, so time-savvy home workouts will serve most people just fine. And beginners can see significant improvements from minimal input.
“This is because any type of resistance training is a new stimulus to the body,” explains Amanda Capritto, a personal trainer who specialises in minimal equipment workouts. “A previously unstimulated neuromuscular and musculoskeletal system will respond quite dramatically to lower total training volumes and less intense stimuli, compared to the more advanced lifter [who will likely require more weight, intensity and volume in their workouts to see progress].”
To prove this point, a new 2025 study published in the European Journal of Applied Physiology found that a five-minute resistance training workout comprising five beginner-friendly bodyweight exercises “significantly improved physical fitness and mental health in sedentary individuals” when performed daily for four weeks.
Fancy trying something similar? Then, every day or two, complete one round of the equipment-free circuit below:
One of the most common training mistakes is stagnation. People get stuck in a loop of doing the same exercises at the same weights for the same number of sets and reps every week.
But given the Said (specific adaptations to imposed demands) principle, in which the body only adapts to better handle the tasks we consistently ask of it, this is one-way traffic to a progress plateau. Instead, you need to gradually increase the challenge of your workouts via a process called progressive overload to continue to see benefits.
Take the five-minute workout above as a case study. For some people, it will present a challenge as written. For others, it may feel like a breeze.
If you’re in the latter camp and it requires less than a seven out of 10 effort, it’s time to increase the difficulty if you want to see progress. You can do this by performing the circuit multiple times, increasing the number of reps you perform of each exercise, increasing the weight you’re lifting (by adding items to the rucksack, and wearing it for the squats and press-ups) or switching to similar but more challenging variations of each exercise.
For example:
Nearly every fitness professional I’ve spoken to swears by the same first pillar for feeling better: improve your sleep. Dan Lawrence, a performance coach to elite athletes such as boxer Conor Benn, is the latest to lend weight to the argument.
“Sleep is the number one recovery tool, and it costs absolutely nothing,” he tells me. “If an athlete had a poor night’s sleep, we identify why. Have they eaten too late? Is their brain going at too fast a rate? Do we need to regulate autonomic status and breathing work? What’s gone on that’s led to poor sleep?”
The problem is, most of us aren’t elite athletes. We have early morning alarms, social commitments and unforeseen interruptions which impact our nightly slumber. However, Lawrence’s points still stand: the aim is to optimise the time we do spend in bed.
He recommends keeping your room cool and finding a sleep set-up that works for you – during Conor Benn’s training camp before his Chris Eubank Jr fight, Lawrence sprang into action after identifying a “pillow issue” which was hampering the star’s sleep.
The Sleep Scientist founder Dr Sophie Bostock also prescribes prioritising consistent sleep and wake times where possible. This will help keep you in sync with your circadian rhythm, helping your various bodily systems run smoothly.
Accessing bright natural light first thing in the morning, leaving a few hours before dinner and bedtime, and finding a way to destress before bed (such as meditation or journaling) can also improve your sleep quality.
The final step when building the base of the fitness pyramid is nutrition. But again, we’re not elite athletes, so you don’t have to weigh everything you eat and take all the fun out of food.
Instead, a few sustainable habits are likely to push the nutrition needle in the right direction, with dramatic carryovers to how you feel and perform.
“Picking some solid nutritional foundations to get better at is a good place to start, even if it’s just one or two things,” says Everything Fat Loss author Ben Carpenter. “Hopefully, they should become easier over the next few months, rather than you following a strict diet for four weeks, then stopping.”
The first foundation he recommends is “focusing on [consuming] nutritious foods rather than high-calorie, ultra-processed foods”.
“If you focus more on nutritious food, it’s building a habit rather than severing one,” he explains. “A lot of diets are focused on restriction and avoidance: you’re not allowed to eat certain things, or you have to reduce your intake of xyz.
“I like focusing on nutritious foods you can add in. They tend to have a habit of displacing other foods out of your diet because appetite is finite.”
Another thing you can do is create a favourable food environment which promotes positive nutrition choices. This can benefit everyone from office workers to elite athletes, as Manchester City Women’s physical performance lead Dan McPartlan explains.
“The eating environment is really important; trying to make the right foods appealing to the players, and buying food that they really want to eat.
“We’ve had a big focus on post-match food over the last few years. When I first arrived, we had little boxes of food that we would put in the microwave at the back of the bus after a game. We now have one of the chefs from the academy who travels with us, and he will cook fresh pasta at the back of the bus.”
If a private pasta specialist isn’t an option, Carpenter says there are easier ways to achieve this.
Try keeping nutritious food options in more accessible spots than less nutritious options. For example, boiled eggs instead of snack bars or fruit on your desk, rather than a communal high-calorie treats like biscuits.
It’s far from a straight swap, granted, but you’re more likely to make positive choices if it is easier to do so.
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