How Much Physical Activity is Enough?

by Nina

The Walk by Vincent van Gough

After reading all those posts by Ram and me (Sitting is the New Smoking, The Ill Effects of Prolonged Sitting (Part 2), The Ill Effects of Prolonged Sitting (Part 1)) about the dangers of being sedentary and/or inactive, you might be wondering exactly how much exercise do you need to do to counteract the time you spend sitting. (A great many of us work at desk jobs, so for many of us spending many hours a day sitting is just a fact of life.) Fortunately for us, some scientists had the exact same question. A recent study in The Lancet called Does physical activity attenuate, or even eliminate, the detrimental association of sitting time with mortality? A harmonised meta-analysis of data from more than 1 million men and women reported the results of a systematic review (meta-analysis) of data from 16 studies that associated daily sitting time and physical activity with “all-cause” mortality. 

I don’t want to keep you in suspense, so I’ll just tell you what they found: 60-75 minutes per day of physical activity seemed to eliminate the increased risk of death associated with too much sitting time. Here’s the conclusion of the study: 

“High levels of moderate intensity physical activity (ie, about 60–75 min per day) seem to eliminate the increased risk of death associated with high sitting time. These results provide further evidence on the benefits of physical activity, particularly in societies where increasing numbers of people have to sit for long hours for work and may also inform future public health recommendations.” 

Now that might leave you with an important question: do I have to do all that exercise in single session?

In the NPR piece in which I heard about this study Care To Offset All Your Office Sitting? It'll Take Just An Hour A Day, Allison Aubrey asked the lead author of the study, Prof Ulf Ekelund, PhD, those very questions. He told her that the answer is yes, you can do your exercise in bits and pieces, at different times of the day, and with different types of exercise He said just be sure that the intensity of your exercise is high enough to get your heart rate up (walking at a brisk pace, for example). He also added, somewhat encouragingly, that even 20 minutes reduces some of the risk. But the more you can exercise you can do, the better. 

So that means if you're practicing yoga for exercise, you don't have to do a single practice that is at least one hour long—you could, for example, do one half an hour in the morning and one half an hour in the evening.  And you could also do a shorter practice and combine with a brisk walk or a bicycle ride or any other physical activity that you enjoy. 

I’m sure we’ll be hearing more on this topic in the near future and they'll probably be changing their minds like they always seem to do. But I say for now aiming for 60 minutes of physical activity per day is a reasonable goal to aim for. Are you with me?

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Decide Each Day What to Do

by Nina

Last Hike by Shitao

In a recent NY Times article about weight loss The Empty Diet Claim Season, Jane Brody said something simple that I just loved:

“Make physical exercise a daily activity. Decide each day what to do rather than whether to do it.”

To me that’s not only good advice for people who are concerned with losing or managing their weight, it’s also good advice for people like us who are concerned with staying healthy as we age. In his book The Story of the Human Body, Dr. Daniel Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist, says that the human body evolved to support the physically active life of a hunter-gatherer who treks miles each day to hunt and forage. And he says that many of the diseases of modern life (and aging), such as diabetes and heart disease, are the result of a “mismatch” between the environment of physical activity and food limitations that the human body originally evolved to thrive in, and the modern environment of sedentary behavior and food surplus in which we now live. So to stay healthy, we do need to be physically active on a daily basis.

I mentioned in my post  Friday Q&A: How Do You Keep Fit? that I had surveyed the Yoga for Healthy Aging writers about their exercise habits, and while we all seemed to be quite different in what we did, it turns out we had three things in common:

• we exercise every day
• we practice yoga asana regularly for exercise
• we also do some types of exercise other than yoga

For me, each day I do exactly what Jane Brody recommends: I decide each day what to do rather than whether to do it. I usually practice yoga four days a week for 1.5 hours and take a two-hour class on Friday. Saturday and Sunday I take long walks in the city or hikes in the country, and during the week I also take walks around the city (I use my feet for transportation) to do my shopping and errands, to meet friends for lunch, or just as a way of hanging with a friend—or husband. But sometimes I like to mix it up. Why not? If it’s a beautiful day, I might take a walk instead of practicing yoga. If it’s dumping rain, I might stay in and practice on a weekend. I’m good as long as I get some exercise that day.

On Friday, I did recommend to the reader who wanted to get started with some gentle movement that she consider starting with short, but daily sessions to establish a new habit, and for that post I didn’t want her to become overwhelmed by reading about what us long-time yoga practitioners did on a daily basis. But since I did the survey anyway, I thought it might be useful to share that information with you now so you can see several different ways of making exercise a daily activity.

Baxter’s Exercise Routine

Lately, in addition to 30-60 minute home yoga practices several times a week, as well as a weekly Friday public class I attend when I am in town, I have been attempting to take a 30-60 minute walk/hike for aerobic fitness. I am also riding my bike to work when the weather cooperates, and once or twice a week I do some simple weight work at a gym where I teach to combat the sarcopenia (see Strength and Aging) that affects muscles as we age.

Shari’s Exercise Routine

I do daily yoga, in the past (pre-surgery) for 30 min and currently (post surgery) it varies from 5-30 minutes. I also do daily aerobic exercise either on a bike or indoors on a stationary bike for 30 min (now it is 15 and not aerobic, with no heart rate changes but range of motion for my healing knee). I also walk daily for 30 minutes either outisde or on a treadmill. In the past I would do specific strength training on the mat with free weights for targeted muscle groups maybe two times per week (now daily as part of my knee rehab but no weights yet) and timed holds for certain yoga poses (60 seconds) to build strength and bone mass.

Ram Exercise Routine

MONDAY-FRIDAY
6.00-6.45am-GYM
7.00-7.30am-Pranayama + Meditation
6.00-6.30pm-Pranayama + Meditation

MONDAY & WEDNESDAY
12.00-1.00pm-Yoga

SUNDAY
8.00-9.15am-Yoga (I teach the class)

Timothy’s Exercise Routine

I do a couple of hours of asana per day, but probably none of it would be counted as aerobic. I also sit for chanting, pranayama and meditation for more than an hour each morning. After many years of belonging to gyms and health clubs, in recent years, I've backed off from such vigorous "cardio" exercise. I always tried to get my heart rate high into the aerobic range and keep it there for 45 or more minutes and did this several times per week.  Now in addition to yoga, I do gentler aerobic exercise such as hiking, dancing, swimming and bike riding and pay little attention to my heart rate. Part of the change comes from my understanding of Ayurveda. Considering my fiery pitta nature, I believe that more soothing exercise is actually better for me. And it's a lot more fun….

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Fast Exercise vs. Slow Yoga

by Nina 

Image "Borrowed" from The New York Times

The exercises should be performed in rapid succession, allowing 30 seconds for each, while, throughout, the intensity hovers at about an 8 on a discomfort scale of 1 to 10, Mr. Jordan says. Those seven minutes should be, in a word, unpleasant. The upside is, after seven minutes, you’re done. —New York Times

Did anyone else happen to see the recent New York Times seven-minute exercise routine? Well, I did. And my first response was irritation. Something seemed so wrong to me about the routine. At first, I thought it was the seven minutes part. That seemed to me a crazy amount of time for doing twelve exercises, and I thought it would be healthier and more effective to divide up the routine into, say, three or four different routines, and cycle between them on different days. That way, you could spend more time on each exercise and not do the same thing every day (which could lead to boredom or even injury).

But even after I had my private little rant about the subject, every time I saw that picture I continued to feel irritated; it was like a grain of sand in the soft belly of an oyster (not that this rant is going to turn out to be pearl, mind you). But it wasn’t until a few days later that I realized what was really bothering me: it was the phrase “seven minutes of steady discomfort.”

“In 12 exercises deploying only body weight, a chair and a wall, it fulfills the latest mandates for high-intensity effort, which essentially combines a long run and a visit to the weight room into about seven minutes of steady discomfort — all of it based on science.” — Gretchen Reynolds

It seems to me if exercise is something so unpleasant that you do just to get it over with, you’re never going to be able to incorporate it into your life on a regular basis, something people in our exercise-averse culture desperately need to do. I mean, why would you want to add seven unpleasant minutes to your life every day? I can’t help but feel that half an hour of enjoyable exercise has got to be better for you than seven minutes of “steady discomfort.” It’s kind of like the difference between fast food and slow food. For me, yoga asana practice is truly an enjoyable, sensual experience, where I'm present in my body and appreciating what it can do and how it feels. Why would I ever want to trade that for fast, efficient, and unpleasant? (Actually the phrase “all of it based on science” irritated me a bit, too. I’ve had food concocted by nutrition scientists and food made by with love by friends and family members, and, of course, no contest there.)

Granted, sometimes it’s a bit hard for me to get started with my yoga practice—there’s a certain mental inertia that makes me reluctant to switch to that activity—but once I begin, I almost always enjoy myself. Of course, there are moments of unpleasantness (the mild painfulness of a stretch, the frustration of falling out of a balance pose, the feeling of mild fatigue after holding a strenuous pose for an extended period of time), but these are interspersed with moments of pleasure and even joyfulness. (I’m thinking now of a fellow student in my weekly class, who, when we do her favorite pose, now always says to me with a twinkle in her eye, “Oh, boy!”) Then, there’s the huge bonus that a mindful asana practice confers in addition to strength, flexibility, balance, and agility: stress reduction.

Maybe I’m preaching to the choir here, but for our physical and emotional health (not to mention healthy aging), we each need to find a form of exercise that is a life-affirming experience rather than a form of torture that we must submit to. And it’s worth the extra time, even just, say, 20 minutes rather than 7, to make that kind of practice a part of your life. Of course, I love yoga, so I’m always here singing its praises. But if you hate every minute of the yoga you’re currently practicing, try some different styles. And if you hate all the styles, maybe it’s not for you. Walk, run, cycle, swim, work out in a gym, dance, play golf, tennis, basketball or soccer, ski—get out there and live!

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