Archive for the ‘Fitness’ Category


Have a Plan B

May 6th, 2009 by David

How many times have you intended to go for that run or get to the gym and it just hasn’t happened? Or you’ve woken up thinking you would go for a walk or ride and ‘accidentally’ turned off the alarm and fallen back to sleep.

I’m not just talking about when you don’t get there or get up because you just don’t feel like it; although I know that happens. I’m also talking about when, through no fault of your own, something gets in the way of you doing the exercise you planned to do. It can be frustrating, and in some cases be enough to get you out of your routine for a few days. It doesn’t take much to disrupt an exercise routine and change your mental focus; you miss one day and next thing you know it a week has gone by and you haven’t exercised.

I certainly recommend people stick to their routine as much as possible because we are creatures of habit. If you can’t however, having a Plan B is a good way to keep you mentally focused on getting some exercise in. What do I mean by Plan B? A plan B is an alternative exercise session that you can do when your normal activity isn’t possible. It might not be as strenuous or take as long as your normal exercise but that’s not so important. What is important is to do something so you stay in the habit of exercise.

I have a few Plan B’s, that I call on when my normal routine doesn’t happen. Here are some examples to give you some ideas for your Plan B:

  • 15 minutes in the home gym (shed) doing as many different exercises as I can in that time.
  • A twenty minute ride around a local park (in my case Kings Park) or any area close to home.
  • Walking to the local shops and back (even if I don’t need to buy anything (I don’t recommend this one to my sister who loves to shop!))
  • Push-ups, squats, shoulder presses and planks during the ads while I’m watching TV.
  • Skipping for 10 minutes in the backyard.

It doesn’t matter what your Plan B is, as long as it gets you doing something and keeps you in the ‘exercise habit’. The law of inertia says that is takes a lot more effort to get something moving than it does to keep it moving. I think it is the same with regular exercise. It’s a lot easier to keep your exercise program going than it is to let it stop and try to get started again. Just doing something, even if it is only for a few minutes, can keep in the habit.
Staying fit is about being consistent; developing an exercise routine that works for you and making it a habit for life. Having a Plan B helps you stay in,or get back into, your routine quicker when other things get in the way.

Your TO DO – come up with four or five Plan B’s that you can use. Write them down and keep them ready for when you miss a session. If you have any great ideas for Plan Bs let me know and I’ll share them with others.

Note: I don’t think there is anything wrong with missing an exercise session. Certainly your fitness won’t fall apart if you miss the occasional workout. Plan B’s are designed to prevent you falling out of routine completely. They are more for your head than they are for your body!

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Paying people to get fit

April 28th, 2009 by David

In the last blog I suggested we need a different approach to solve the current and looming crisis in our health system. I proposed that perhaps the government should invest more money than they do into getting people more active and fitter. I believe this will be essential to reduce demand for health services in the future.

An interesting study I read about recently gives some insight into how investing some money up front might make a difference in the long term.

The economists from the University of California, started from the premise that exercise is a habit; some people have developed the habit and some haven’t. The researchers designed experiments to find out whether financial incentives can help. They recruited 120 students and gave them each a brochure on the benefits of exercise. Forty received just the brochure, 40 received $25 if they went to the (free) gym once the following week and 40 were offered an extra $100 if they went to the gym eight times or more in the next four weeks.

The researchers used attendance records from the gym to compare all 120 students’ gym visits before, during and for seven weeks after the study finished.

The results were quite encouraging. The students who were paid to attend the gym for four weeks not only went during the study, they continued to go after they stopped being paid. They continued to attend about as often as when they were being paid.

The economists concluded that “it may be possible to encourage the formation of good habits by offering monetary compensation for a sufficiently long baseline period, as doing so appears to move some people past the threshold needed to engage in the activity.”

For many people, just feeling good and looking better isn’t enough to develop the habit. This is probably because it takes some time before you start to feel good and look different. Many people give up long before the results start to show up on their waist or in the mirror. Having a financial incentive to keep a person going until the results appear might be the answer many need.

Imagine if governments paid people to attend a gym or exercise regularly for 12 months. By then many would have formed the habit of exercising and continue to do so. The long term savings to the health system would be phenomenal. Given the current pressures and looming crisis in our health systems, it may be one way to reduce the demand for health services.  Continually trying to meet that demand is never going to work.

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Do we need a new paradigm on health?

April 9th, 2009 by David

If you are like me you like me you probably subscribe to more than one email newsletter so you get different perspectives on topics that interest you. Nutrition is such an important part of fitness (you can’t run a performance vehicle on cheap fuel) so I subscribe to two nutrition newsletters, Nutrition Impact by Glenn Cardwell and Food Bytes by Julie Meek. Both are excellent and will make you think about how, what and why you eat.

In Glenn’s latest newsletter he talks about a long term diet study that followed participants on different diets for two years. In summary, what the researchers found was that the average weight loss was about three kilograms over the two years. Not much really, given the enormity of the obesity problem around the world.

At the end of his report on this study Glenn quotes Professor Martijn Katan who states that “We do not need another diet trial, we need a change in paradigm.”

I couldn’t agree more and I think it applies just much to our health system as to weight loss (the two are very much related). Imagine if we changed the focus of the health system from ‘fixing’ people when they get sick to helping them perform better; if we rewarded health professionals for having the fittest patients who used the least medical and hospital resources; if health professionals were paid more for preventive programs; if individuals were rewarded for being fitter and healthier.

I know these comments make it sound simple to fix the huge mess our health system is in. Sometimes the simple suggestion is what is needed. I don’t believe we will ever ‘fix’ the health system with more hospitals and more expensive medical tests. The real answer to the health system bottle-neck is to reduce demand for medical and hospital services. Let’s face it. No one really wants to go to hospital.

We are continually being told that with an ageing population our current health system won’t be able to keep up with demand. All the effort seems to be about increasing the supply of health services to meet the demand. Maybe we should be focusing on reducing demand. We also hear that if health expenditure continues to increase at its current rate it will bankrupt the economy. Another financial crisis! Imagine if the government threw as much money at preventive health initiatives as it has at the looming recession. We wouldn’t need many of the hospitals they keep talking about.

This sounds very idealistic, but major changes in thinking often start with an idealistic viewpoint.

What can you do? Do everything you can to stay as fit and healthy as possible. Keep reading these newsletters for advice and inspiration and subscribe to newsletters like Glenn’s and Julie’s to learn about eating and nutrition. Encourage others to do the same.

Be a role model to the people in your life, especially your family.

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Darwin was right too.

March 24th, 2009 by David

Who would have thought that Charles Darwin’s Survival of the Fittest theory would be so applicable to us all in the 21st century. In his theory, Darwin proposed that the fitter and stronger of a species would survive. Although I have always believed this to be the case for humans, it was exciting to see some research that verified this.

A recent research paper in the British Medical Journal reported the findings of a longitudinal study that followed over 2205 men from when they were in their fifties through to their eighties. They examined the relationship between activity and mortality.

In summary, what they found was:

  1. There is a dose dependent association between level of physical activity and total mortality in middle aged men. That is, the more active the men were the less their risk of dying.
  1. The relative rate reduction attributable to high physical activity was 32% for low and 22% for medium physical activity. If you were in the high activity group you had a 32% less risk of dying compared to the low level activity men.
  1. Men who increased their physical activity level between the ages of 50 and 60 continued to have a higher mortality rate during the first five years of follow-up. After 10 years of follow-up their increased physical activity was associated with reduced mortality to the level of men with unchanged high physical activity. That is, their risk of dying was equivalent to those men who had been active all their life.
  1. The reduction in mortality associated with increased physical activity was similar to that associated with quitting smoking. Imagine if society had placed as much emphasis on getting people exercising and fitter as it has on getting them to stop smoking.

Like all research, you have to be careful assuming that this will apply to everyone, other than Swedish middle-aged men, but I believe if this study could be repeated with different population groups, the findings would be similar.

It is also worth noting that activity levels were determined based on a self-assessment. In my experience, most people over-estimate how active they are, so if you genuinely exercise regularly at a fairly high intensity, you may have an even lower risk than those in this study.

Strength training and high intensity interval training for older adults is relatively new advice, so it will be interesting to see how this compares in reducing mortality with aerobic exercise and just being generally active. I believe it will be found to be just as or even more beneficial, especially in older age groups.

What does all this mean?

  • The more active (fitter) you are, the less your risk of dying prematurely.
  • It’s never too late to start an exercise program to reduce your risk of dying early.
  • Getting fitter reduces your risk as much as quitting smoking. (Imagine if we could get an anti-unfitness lobby going!)

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Posted by David Posted in Fitness, Outcomes, Strength | 1 Comment »


Some facts about strength training

March 5th, 2009 by David

For many people, just the mention of weight training conjures up images of sweaty, muscle bound-men in smelly gyms lifting huge weights and making a lot of grunting noises. Understandably, this puts people off even before they know much about weight training.

So, if you have some reservations about weight training or are still confused about what the benefits here are some facts about weight training.

Weight Training done correctly helps reduce reduce fat and improves health risk

Both weight training and aerobic exercise, if done correctly and at a high enough intensity, release fatty acids into the blood stream and improve insulin resistance. Weight training has the advantage in that it increases lean body mass which helps improve insulin resistance even more and increases metabolism even when you are not exercising.  The research evidence to date does not demonstrate the effectiveness of resistance training for weight loss.  It does however increase the loss of fat and increase fat-free mass which in the long term is advantageous to managing body fat.  Even without any change in weight or body fat, health risk is improved with resistance training. 

Strength training can be done in a short amount of time

Many people think you need to spend hours ‘pumping iron’ to get benefits from weight training. If you work efficiently and focus on the major muscle groups, you can complete a whole body workout in a short period of time. There are some fitness professionals who say you only need to spend about 10 minutes. I’ve done workouts of about this length and if you work hard and fast it can be done.

You don’t need to go to a gym or buy expensive equipment

Not having the ‘right’ equipment is a common excuse for not doing strength training. You can get a good strength session using just your own body weight. If you want to add more resistance, a pair of adjustable dumbbells is certainly enough to get stronger and maintain your muscle tissue.

Strength training is a good weapon against osteoporosis

Osteoporosis is a major health risk for many adults. Strength training puts stresses on the bones and it is this stress that encourages the bones to get stronger and denser. Unlike aerobic exercise, which tends to be the same movement repeated over and over, strength training puts a lot of different stresses on different bones. This helps to improve the density of a range of bones in the body.

You won’t get ‘big and bulky’ like a body builder

Many people, especially women are fearful of looking like a body builder if they do weight training. Unless you are doing hours and hours of training, eating a very high protein, high energy diet, and probably taking anabolic steroids, you won’t get a physique like a body builder. If you do two or three strength training sessions a week you will probably see some increase in muscle size and you will look more ‘toned’. Females especially won’t ‘bulk up’ as they have less testosterone than men.

Strength training is the most efficient choice of exercise and I strongly recommend you add some to your exercise routine. A couple of short sessions each week is all it takes to maintain your strength and muscle mass.

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