Another reminder of why you need to get moving!

We know you know, but here it is again: exercise is the most natural and easy way you can stay healthy and live longer. The first scientific study to show this was published in London, England, back in 1843. At that time, research had already revealed that the mortality rate of sedentary people was higher than that of those who were physically active. Now, outside of other factors like smoking, age and diet, we know that exercise considerably reduces the risks of today’s most common diseases, namely heart disease, type 2 diabetes and cancer... Not to mention the benefits on the most common psychological state in our times: depression. Here's a short reminder of some of the ways an active lifestyle benefits you:

Heart Disease
Overall, exercise reduces the risk of heart disease by more than 40% in terms of all major risk factors. People who are very active physically, such as marathon runners and triathletes, rarely suffer from heart disease. Exercise protects you in many ways: increased good cholesterol (HDL) and, with a lot of exercise, a drop in bad cholesterol (LDL); reduced blood pressure between 8 mm and 12 mm (sometimes enough to avoid medication) and reduced abdominal fat (the most dangerous fat for the heart). As well, exercise is a key part of post-heart attack treatment.

Cancer
Physically active people are less likely to end up with cancer than those of us who are sedentary. Should they have the misfortune of being hit with this disease, they have a greater chance of surviving, since their physical condition enables them to handle more the powerful and thus more effective treatments. The most common cancers whose risk is reduced by exercise: breast cancer (namely from the anti-estrogen effect of exercise) and colon cancer. The risk can drop by 30% to over 50%. No other prevention factor is as powerful! In the fight against obesity, exercise could also reduce the risk of developing cancers of the pancreas and oesophagus.

Type 2 Diabetes
This is the most common form of diabetes in the world. Exercise is effective prevention of diabetes, since it acts like a shot of insulin. It reduces blood sugar levels and improves the effectiveness of the available insulin. This results in the body being able to control its own blood sugar with less insulin. This hypoglycaemic effect is all the more apparent in endurance athletes. They produce up to two times more insulin than the average adult but maintain normal blood sugar levels. Moreover, when an overweight person loses weight, exercise attacks head-on one of the major risk factors of Type 2 diabetes: obesity.

Depression
Moderate aerobic exercise fights depression by letting people play an active role in improving their situation. Exercise helps make them feel more in control of their life. It is also believed that exercise affects us biochemically by freeing certain euphoric substances in the brain like endorphins and serotonin (anti-depressive effect). All in all, exercise practised regularly acts as a statin (a medication that lowers cholesterol levels), an antihypertensive, an anti-estrogen medication, a hypoglycaemic and an antidepressant. If you could put exercise into a pill, it would definitely be the most sold drug in the world, and the only one without side effects except for the odd ache or pain!

Exercise to lose weight: time or intensity?

More and more people are turning to exercise to lose weight and stay healthy, but the same question often comes up: to lose fat, should we do moderate exercise for a longer period of time or vigorous exercise for a short period of time?

First, you should know that we are talking about aerobic exercise - the type of effort increases metabolism, which, in turn, increases calorie expenditure. These are the best exercises you can do to lose weight, and can be done at moderate or high intensity. Intensity is considered moderate if you are a bit hot and are breathing quicker than at rest. Intensity is high if you are hot and breathing quickly without actually becoming out of breath. Think cross-country skiing on flat ground, snowshoeing in shallow snow, speed-walking or light winter jogging, swimming, or using a cardiovascular exercise machine (stationery bike, elliptical machine, treadmill, step machine, etc.).
 
Focus on Duration
 
This is a realistic approach. If you want to lose weight, and you are not in shape, you will find it easier to do moderate exercise versus high-intensity exercise. Plus, you will be less likely to injure yourself, which is a risk when an unfit person starts straight into vigorous exercise. By putting the emphasis on duration, you give yourself the chance to exercise every day and control your weight. If you exercised intensely, you would have to sometimes take days to rest to allow your muscles to recuperate.

This being said, how long should you practise moderate aerobic exercise? The best thing to do during the first few weeks is to schedule in three ten-minute sessions of exercise (or two 15-minute sessions) during the day, if possible every day. The idea is to stimulate your metabolism two or three times a day, for a total of 30 minutes of moderate physical activity, which is the minimum amount of exercise recommended by experts for people to remain healthy. This plan will help you use up about 150 calories more per day, or 1,000 more per week. If you want to speed up weight loss and are very motivated, you can gradually increase your total exercise sessions to 45 minutes a day. You will lose, more or less, one pound of fat in less than 2.5 weeks as long as you do not increase the calories you eat.

Secondly: Intensity

After one month of moderate exercise, you will have improved your physical condition and started to lose weight. You can then think about increasing your training. There are two advantages to higher intensity exercises: better cardio and more calorie expenditure per minute. By doing more vigorous exercises, you also create a larger “energy debt” for your body. In other words, after doing so, your metabolism remains high and you continue to burn calories for two or three extra hours without lifting a finger! This post-exercise burn, often “forgotten” when calculating the number of calories used, is immense, especially if you exercise several times a week.

Compromising with Intervals

The major problem with intense exercise is that you could lose motivation in the long run. Therefore, it is worthwhile to integrate more intense work into moderate exercise sessions: in other words, interval training. Let’s say you speed walk at about 110-120 steps per minute. During your 10-to-15- minute session, walk even quicker for about 30 seconds every two minutes at a pace of about 130-135 steps per minute. You can apply the same principle to swimming, cross-country skiing, winter jogging or running on a treadmill. Why are intervals beneficial? They increase the number of calories burnt without increasing the time you exercise. In concrete terms, you will still be exercising for 30 minutes a day, but you will be burning 1,300 calories a week instead of 1,000.

In fact, interval training provides great results for those who want to lose weight and improve their health through exercise. A study at the Centre of Preventive Medicine and Physical Fitness at the Montreal Heart Institute confirmed the effectiveness of this type of exercise. Nine months after following the Kilo-Actif program, 62 obese people participating in the study lost an average of 5.5% of their body mass and 5.15% around their waist. Moreover, they had increased their physical ability by 15%. Their bad cholesterol (LDL) had dropped by 7%, and their good cholesterol (HDL) had climbed by 8%. And all that in under a year!

Move Every Day to maintain weight

Recently researchers at the Mayo Clinic in the USA revealed the essential role that daily physical activity plays in regulating our weight. Twenty subjects (10 slim and 10 obese) were equipped with a sophisticated system for evaluating daily calorie expenditure and then monitored for ten days. They noticed that the slim subjects burned approximately 350 calories more per day than their obese counterparts. Also interesting: the obese subjects were sedentary for two hours longer per day.

The Most Effective Type of Exercise?

When it comes to getting off the sofa and moving around, anything is better than nothing. But experts have found that not all exercise is created equal.

When it comes to heart health, cardiovascular - or aerobic - exercise is what you need to focus on, with stretching and weight training playing a supporting role.

Good forms of cardiovascular exercise include swimming, which is an overall body workout and which really gets your heart pumping; walking, when done with purpose; and running, which  is well known for its overall health benefits and has a great impact on heart health in particular.

If you prefer to exercise at a gym there are a great number of aerobic classes to choose from, including spinning, aerobics, Tae-bo and many more. You can also join a dance group and learn salsa or ballroom dancing, both of which are extremely good cardiovascular exercises and just so happen to be great fun.

The American Heart Association advises that whichever option you choose, to be effective you must do it regularly, three to four times a week, for a minimum of 30 minutes and it must increase your heart rate for the duration. You can also break your exercise sessions down to 10 minutes three times a day, if necessary.

And while weightlifting may make you look good on the outside, the experts advise that unless it is done in conjunction with aerobic exercise it will not have much of an impact on heart health.

Don't forget; The heart is a muscle, so the stronger it is, the more effective it will be in pumping blood around the body, improving oxygen transport and circulation. 

And the more physical activity we do the better chance we have of lowering our blood pressure, and the less pressure there is on the heart the healthier it will be.

An active prescription

Good news, hot on the heels of our prize-giving events, where Dr. Steven Blair expressed concerns over physicians neglecting to recommend exercise: More and more U.S. adults are being told by their doctor to get out and get active, according to government survey released this week.

Nearly 33 per cent of adults who saw a doctor in the previous year said they were told to exercise. That was up from about 23 percent in 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported.

The report also found more women got that advice than men. And among people with chronic health problems, diabetics, were the most likely to get the advice and cancer patients were least likely.

The most dramatic - and surprising - increases were reported in patients age 85 and older. In 2000, about 15 percent were told by doctors to exercise. By 2010, almost 30 percent were getting such a recommendation. "It's very encouraging that doctors feel people at that age still have time to live and can make their health better," said Pat Barnes, a CDC health statistician who was lead author of the report.

The report was based on a survey of nearly 22,000 adults in 2010. The CDC then compared the results to similar surveys done in 2000 and 2005.

The doctors' advice may be getting through to at least some people. Other CDC data has found that about 51 percent of Americans said they exercise regularly in 2009, up from about 46 percent in 2001.

However, more than one third of U.S. adults are obese, a statistic that's held steady for nearly a decade.

Our inaugural winner holds crowds captive in Toronto and Montreal

When we launched the Bloomberg Manulife Prize in May last year, we were excited, ambitious and set the standard high for would-be applicants. But we could never have imagined that our inaugural winner would be such a world-renowned leader in his field, or that his message would be so simple and easy for us implement into our daily lives.

On the evening of Wednesday, January 11th, the MaRS centre in Toronto was packed full of McGill grads and friends, prize founders, sponsors, and media there to hear Dr. Steven Blair deliver this message - and he did not disappoint. After warm introductions from Vice-Principal Marc Weinstein, Dean Hélène Perrault, and Principal Heather Munroe-Blum, the South Carolina professor delivered a fascinating talk on what he has learned over four decades of research in the field of active health.

An engaging and funny speaker, Dr. Blair - who by his own admission is short, fat and balding, but in better shape than most of us - spoke about his concern that the 'obesity cartel' is distracting our attention away from the real public health problem of the 21st Century: physical inactivity. He argued again and again, with impressive supporting data, that weight is of much less importance than fitness, and that if we begin to incorporate more exercise into our lives, the obesity epidemic will take care of itself.


Following the presentation, moderator Beatrice Politi, health reporter from Global Toronto, put some thought-provoking questions to Dr. Blair, followed by queries from an eager audience. The night ended with wine, hors d'oeuvres and a line of fans waiting to speak with our richly-deserving winner.

The following day, another 300 souls braved much colder conditions to join us in the ballroom of the McGill Students Union in Montreal, where Dr. Blair gave a lunchtime presentation - expanding on many of the themes he had outlined in Toronto. Guests munched on a healthy brown-bag lunch while moderator Jill Barker - health columnist for The Gazette - and a PhD student from the faculty of education put their questions to him.

We could not have hoped for a winner who so embodies the values of this prize, and we wish him every success in the future. His message - 30 minutes of exercise per day - is a modest goal for us all, but as Dr. Steven Blair has shown, it is one of the most important lifestyle changes we could ever make.

Congratulations Dr. Blair, and all who were involved in making our prizegiving events such a success. We have high hopes for the calibre of future winners and are excited about the Bloomberg Manulife Prize in 2012.


In the meantime, keep an eye on our facebook and twitter feeds for up-to-date active health news, views and tips. You can also find photos from both of our January events on our flickr page.

Dr. Blair's tips for a longer, healthier life

January is the month when resolutions are made and broken, but we're here to help you get fit and healthy, not just for 2012, but for good.

The main objective of the Bloomberg Manulife Prize is to get important research findings to you, the public. And so we are delighted that our inaugural winner, Dr. Steven Blair has a message that is simple, effective, and easy to incorporate into your everyday life: 30 minutes of moderate exercise per day.

Sure, you've been told exercise is good for you - but here's a world-class scientist who has broken it down: if you do 30 minutes of light activity per day, you have a very good chance of reducing your mortality rate by 50%. That's it! You're decreasing the chances of dying early from heart problems, stroke, diabetes and a host of other unwelcome ends.

To make things even easier, here's a handy little video, and below, we've distilled some of Dr. Blair's advice into concrete action points so you can get started straight away:

Do it today!

• Book a regular sports activity with friends: try tennis, swimming, or badminton twice a week
• Get a dog (or offer to walk someone else's): Research shows that most dog owners get the recommended 150 minutes exercise per week just from walking their pet.
• Get off the bus one stop early or park a few blocks from work, the walk contributes to your 30 minutes a day (one study found that for every increase of 10 minutes in your walk to work, there is a 12% reduction in the likelihood of getting high blood pressure).
• Try giving up TV: A large Australian study found that TV watchers (lifetime average of 6 hours per day) live about 5 years less than those who don't watch TV.
• How about dancing? Any kind counts, but try latin favourites like Salsa and Samba to really get your heart pumping.
• You've heard it before - take the stairs instead of the elevator.
• Be active around the house: activities like cleaning windows, vacuuming, and gardening can all contribute to your 30 minutes.

ADHD and Active Kids

Although experts find it hard to agree on specific diagnosis criteria for attention defecit hyperactivity disorder, a recently published study has claimed that about one in twenty children suffer from some form of this difficult condition. Treatments vary, but more and more children in North America and beyond are being prescribed prescription drugs for “developmentally inappropriate levels of inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity that cause significant impairment in daily functioning.”

In response to the growing  apprehension surrounding children on psychiatric medications, the Journal of Physical and Active Health published a study this year examining the connection between rates of physical activity among children and symptoms of ADHD, and the results are certain to please parents, children and physical education advocates alike.

To cut straight to the chase, the “Conclusions” section of the study states: “Using a community-based, nationally representative sample of children aged 5 to 7 years old from the United States, the results of the current study suggest that physical education, as a structured form of physical activity, may be considered as associated with lower levels of symptoms of ADHD across time.”

According to the authors of the study, physical exercise bolsters the brain’s ability to generate brain tissue and can also work therapeutically to reduce the “mental fatigue” associated with ADHD. Noting that children afflicted with ADHD tend to have impaired social skills, the study’s authors suggest that structured, group-based physical activity - in addition to providing benefits “similar… to those of pharmacological interventions,” - can help children improve their social skills while alleviating their symptoms and receiving the physical benefits of exercise.

The element of structure seems key here – while afflicted students showed markedly reduced tendencies toward disruptive behaviors in the classroom on days when a ten-minute recess was provided, the study notes that unstructured physical activity increase the likelihood of aggressive and violent behaviors on the part of children with ADHD, meaning more structured forms such as physical education would likely be of the most benefit, with the additional advantage of being curriculum-based and therefore more “school-friendly.”

This is all great news, but it bears mentioning that the mechanism by which this principle operates is still unclear. The study notes that physical activity is known to stimulate activity in the cathecholamine system (a collection of brain cells associated with dopamine and norepinephrine), the dysfunction of which has been connected to symptoms of ADHD, which is about as user-friendly an explanation as it looks. It’s also suggested that physical activity has a calming effect on children with ADHD simply because being tired mellows them out, an explanation that seems rather elegant in its simplicity. Either way, while acknowledging that the discontinuation of routine physical activity can lead to a persistent reemergence of symptoms, the study points out that there are few if any negative consequences to pursuing this course of treatment, and the potential benefits to children are impressive, including addressing the childhood obesity epidemic.

Click here to see the study, which is refreshingly brief and readable.