What is the baseline amount of exercise for a person to be healthy?

The human body is built for movement.  If we do not move frequently, we become weaker and life is shortened: "Being upright and able to move freely" is a cynic's definition of being alive!  It is not a question of whether or not exercise is good for you: The real question is 

"How much and how often should we exercise to remain healthy throughout life?"

I am convinced that the keys to longevity are:

• Nutritional balancing which is increasingly important as we get older.
• Harmony in one's life - loving, healthy relationships and community and not holding grudges.
• Regular, moderate exercise.
• Being free of disease and the need for medication.

What do we mean by "moderate"?  Probably the easiest measure is steady exercise that is sufficient to have you puffing while still allowing you to keep a conversation going.

The baseline amount of moderate exercise necessary for health, as determined by one study after another, is surprisingly little.  Most experts recommend accumulating 30 minutes of moderate exercise at least days a week: Exercises such as digging the garden, swimming and walking.  Notice I used the word "accumulating".  Whether it is 5 minutes of exercise here and there, such as walking up the stairs instead of taking the lift and walking home it really does not matter.  What really matters is the total time per day.  Pedometers can be very handy for keeping track of cumulative exercise by the way.

While most adults probably meet the daily and weekly minimum, I wonder how many of their children get anywhere near it?

Excessive exercise, on the other hand, may shorten your life.  Four or more hours of intense exercise, such as running, per week may be all it takes to negate the benefits of exercise for health and longevity.  I am convinced that excessive exercise does impair health and shorten life - I do not need any research to tell me this.  I can see it around me.  However, in case you think I am contradicting my own behaviour which is as a practitioner of extreme, intense exercise, I exercise as such with an intense awareness of the dangers of doping so and take preventive measure.  How I do this will have to be the topic of a future article.

The "Lift and Press"

People often ask me "What is the single most important exercise to do daily for health?"

Other than walking briskly, there is one exercise that is most beneficial: The "Life and Press".

One of the characteristics of getting old and fragile is the slumping of posture, often to the point where the person may still appear to be slumped in a lounge chair, even when standing.  Incidentally, this slumped posture is now quite common in our children.  What will they be like at 60 years!

The lift and press exercise - the lifting of a modest weight from the ground to press it and hold it above the head, is the best exercise one can do daily to counter the effects of gravity, weak muscles and sloppy postural habits.  Of course there are more; but let's just do the lift and press.

As a general rule of thumb, choose a weight that can be lifted and pressed above your head 15-20 times in a continuous rhythm.  If you can do more than 20 repetitions, increase the weight a wee bit.  Done once a day, five days a week will do the job.  You do not need expensive weights: Some cans in the pantry inside a couple of pillow cases that are then knotted shut will be sufficient.

The bonus of this exercise is it counts towards your daily exercise quota of 30 minutes!

A strong, upright posture - one of the keys to health.

The "Lift and Press", starting early in life and
continuing this single exercise daily forever.

"Fit Kiwi" doing her daily lift and press dozen

How things that may be good for you may poison you

One thing that really bugs me is the way that prescribing in medicine ignores one of the most fundamental concepts of nutrition:

The Goldilocks Zone: Not too little and not too much

Too little of a nutrient will result in ill health.

Too much of a nutrient will result in ill health.

The key to prescribing is to get things just right!  The Goldilocks Zone.

Instead we see this continuously: "If one scoop per day of this nutrient is good for you, then let's give you 100 scoops!"  Its madness but it is what happens.  Take this case of prescribing vitamin D for example.

Its what you expect of teenage boys trying to bulk up with protein powder.  Its not what you expect of trained health professionals.

Cells are bathed in a nutrient rich fluid.  We nourish them by supplying a steady intake of nutrients.  The last thing a cell wants is a tsunami of a nutrient.  We would never, ever do that to plants in our vege garden would we?  We would kill the plants if we gave a month's worth of nutrients in a single hit.  So why do doctors do this to their patients?

Its madness.

Physiotherapy is similarly affected by this suspension of reality

When we prescribe exercise we apply stress to the body.  We give only sufficient stress to stimulate a strong compensatory response to build more robust structures.  This response takes from two to four days of relative rest to be complete. 

We therefore have the rule of consistently cycling between exercise and recovery: Basically one day of exercise, followed by two days of rest, then one more day of exercise etc.

If we break this rule and exercise hard daily, our risk of illness and injury skyrockets.  All serious athletes know this.  Apparently, many physiotherapists have never learned this, or have long forgotten.

With physiotherapy, it is common to have injured people instructed to perform sometimes strenuous exercise on a daily basis.  This is wrong.  A set of exercises are best performed every second or third day.  If one is to exercise in between, then it should be an exercise that stresses the body in a different way.  So if one lifts weights today, they should go for a walk or swim the following day - not lift more weights.

The only exceptions to this rule are activities like cycling, rowing, walking and swimming.  Lifting weights, stretching cords and running require at least one rest day between sessions.

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About this website

The advice in these articles is given freely without promise or obligation.  Its all about giving you and your family the tools and information to take control of your health and fitness.

Exercise prescription experts are disempowering their patients

Here's an essay by my daughter, Mary-Ann Moller, who is studying sport and exercise nutrition at University of Otago. I think a little of her Dad has rubbed off onto her!  What do you think about what she is saying?  Is she right?  Is there a tendency to create dependence?  Please post your response, thanks.  Incidentally, she got 100% for this essay.

Here's the statement that she had to respond to:

Increasingly exercise is being advocated as a treatment strategy for a range of medical conditions. In response, a new field of 'clinical exercise prescription' has evolved. Clinical exercise specialists aim to prescribe safe and physiologically sound programmes. These specialists working with clients in clinical settings often create a dependence that effectively changes the client's perception of physical activity or exercise. We encourage this dependence by over-complicating exercise prescription.

Consider the above statement and provide well argued support for your interpretation of the statement.

The clinical relationship as it should be.

Exercise prescription experts working in the clinical setting overly complicate exercise prescription creating a dependency. This tendency to encourage the individual to brainlessly defer to the “expert” is symptomatic of what is happening throughout modern society: The insidious process of disempowerment of the individual and the granting of their power of choice to both the State and to the professional Expert. The two drivers of this process are the desire of others to get their hands on the hard-earned dollars of the individual and the ever-growing need by the State to have total control over every aspect of its citizens’ lives. 

An expert is a person who belongs to a secretive organisation, called a “profession”. For a group to be a profession it must have, in addition to rituals of initiation, such as exams and internship, it must have its own secret language in the form of special acronyms and long-winded words. 

In the profession of orthopaedics, for example, indecipherable acronyms abound. These leave the prostate patient in a state of confused awe and helplessness before the God-like specialist.

The diagnosis,“IDKJ”, is authoritatively pronounced by the orthopaedic surgeon and recorded for posterity upon the “God-Sheet”. Upon viewing this pronouncement from On High, all those down the priestly line of command obediently respond with appropriate mutterings of agreement and the patient is anointed with ritualistic treatments, such as ultrasound and core conditioning. “IDKJ”, if you would like to know, is priestly code for “Internal derangement of the knee joint”. That still does not mean much at all to the unwashed. There are actually codes within codes. IDKJ has three meanings. Translated from professional orthopaedic jargon, “IDKJ” actually means “You have something wrong with your knee”. But wait - there’s more to this code. It really means “I Don’t Know Jack-shit”. Only those high up within the orthopaedic priesthood know that one! So, if they don’t know jack-shit about what is going on with a person’s sore knee, why don’t they say so? The reason why they do not is because doing so would be giving away some of the power they have over the individual.

Knowledge is Power: with Ignorance it is Control

This process of disempowerment is in evidence within clinical exercise prescription. The average reading age of New Zealand adults is 13 years, so why use words like “biceps” or “abdominals” when working with a patient when “upper arm” and “tummy” will suffice? Why teach incredibly complex and potentially dangerous exercise routines that involve teetering on an over-sized ball that requires constant supervision to prevent complete confusion and inevitable injury from falling off when the same could be achieved with mowing the lawn with a hand-mower or digging the garden with a spade? Which is better when it comes to real practical rehabilitation? Unless the patients are in training for the next Swiss Ball Olympics!

Further complicating matters for the patient is the drive by over-inflated egos which require constant pumping. Experts need to totally bamboozle their patients to create a dependency which will keep pumping hard to ensure their ego doesn't deflate. Utter complexity with the aid of exclusive props (very expensive exercise machines), along with not really understanding a single word of the professional language ensures patients keep coming back. And this of course equals profit!

Exercise prescription must of course address the health issue at hand, but needs to be in a form that the individual can apply to their unique personal circumstances, relevant to their everyday life. It must be based on their lifestyle and what they prefer to do, without reliance on expensive and fairly inaccessible exercise equipment. When a patient goes to a rehabilitation clinic they are expected to leave their brain in the carpark. Instead, exercise prescription should empower the individual. Experts should be telling the patient “when you get out of the car, don't forget your brain, because you will be needing it!”.

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About this website

The advice in these articles is given freely without promise or obligation.  Its all about giving you and your family the tools and information to take control of your health and fitness.