Exercise right
Importance of physical activity
Exercise, together with nutrition, is considered to be the "penicillin" of lifestyle interventions. A "move more" prescription is often one of the first issued by holistic doctors to combat illness and it is one of the best ways to improve and sustain both good physical and mental health throughout a lifetime.
A study conducted by the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM report 2009 - visual illustration) identified no less than 40 medical conditions for which there is evidence of benefit from regular exercise for prevention or therapy.
Whilst there are variations in responsiveness to regular exercise between one person and the next, being physically active and exercising is a primary and foundational health enhancer for most people.
Physical activity guidelines
The key question then of course is, what is a physical activity / exercise routine that provides a foundation for optimal health and well-being? Many countries provide their own national guidelines and researchers continuously update scientific data and issue new recommendations.
The ACSM guidelines recommend that in order to gain “substantial health benefits, adults should do at least 150 minutes (2 hours and 30 minutes) to 300 minutes (5 hours) a week of moderate-intensity, or 75 minutes (1 hour and 15 minutes) to 150 minutes (2 hours and 30 minutes) a week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic activity. Preferably, aerobic activity should be spread throughout the week.”
Non-sedentary waking behaviour such as walking at a slow pace, cooking, or light household chores are considered light-intensity activities. To be classified as moderate-intensity the activities needs to raise your heart rate such as walking briskly, cycling, playing doubles tennis or physical work in the garden.
Vigorous-intensity raises your heart rate even higher and the type of activity highly depends on your fitness level. They include jogging, running, mountain biking, kayaking, intense physical labour, strenuous fitness classes.
In addition “adults should also do muscle-strengthening activities of moderate or greater intensity and that involve all major muscle groups on 2 or more days a week, as these activities provide additional health benefits.”
One of the most recent and easiest to navigate guidelines that sums up the above really well, was issued by the UKK Institute in Finland (refer illustration below). The UKK Institute is a private research organisation located in Tampere, Finland with a main aim of promoting healthy lifestyle and, in particular, health-enhancing physical activity.
If you are currently engaged in less physical activity as outlined in these guidelines, consider how you can progressively integrate more into your daily life.
In order to get both optimal health benefits and avoid over-exercising it is important to align your physical activity / exercise with your current fitness level and progressively ramp up the amount and intensity as your fitness level improves.
The below resource, developed by Firstbeat, provides exercise options for five different levels of fitness.
As outlined in more detail below, exercise puts stress load on your body. If your lifestyle assessment is currently indicating a stress versus recovery imbalance, adding in intense physical activity may make matters worse rather than better! In this situation there is already insufficient recovery for the amount of stress load so adding in more stress without addressing the recovery deficit will only deplete your body resources further.
Ensuring adequate recovery, aligning exercise with your fitness level and progressively ramping things up are three fundamental principles for getting this right!
Recovery after exercise
To become fitter and stronger, you have to put your body under pressure and push it harder. No pain - no gain as they say.
However all workouts, especially the harder and more intense kind, stress the body. You’re fatiguing muscles and causing microscopic damage to muscle cells. Hormone and enzyme levels fluctuate and inflammation actually increases temporarily.
With good post-exercise recovery, this leads to muscle growth, fat loss, improved insulin sensitivity, reduced inflammation, better cardiovascular fitness and health as well as better overall health and mental well-being.
So importantly, it is actually the combination of exercise and recovery that enables us to get full benefit from exercise and sufficient recovery avoids the negative impact of a stress versus recovery imbalance.
How physical activity moderates the effects of stress
Whilst stress is not specifically listed as one of the 40 conditions for which exercise is an effective remedy, it deserves special mention. Stress imposes a threat on the body and triggers a set of "flight or fight" responses, including mobilising energy and inducing a state of insulin resistance in the body.
This was highly functional in ancient times for survival when these threats were primarily physical ones, requiring indeed this mobilisation of physical energy to fight of the threat or escape unharmed. In modern society these threats have been replaced by emotional, financial, psychological, relational etc stressors for which our body triggers the exact same stress responses.
Important difference however is that the energy being mobilised is not used and can be stored as visceral fat. Visceral fat is what accumulates in the abdomen underneath the abdominal muscles and around your abdominal organs like the stomach, liver, and intestines. Physical activity therefore has an additional benefit of being a natural way of preventing or addressing this physical (metabolic) effect of chronic stress.
Increased cardiovascular fitness also raises heart rate variability which is correlated with good health, mental well-being and performance. Higher HRV also indicates a better functioning and more resilient nervous system which means you are more able to quickly and effectively respond to changes in your environment and are better able to buffer, cope with and recover from stress.
A few final tips
In summary, physical activity is incredible good for us especially when we fine-tune what we do, how often we do it and when we do it.
Interestingly, the healthiest and longest living people (who live in some specific region around the world, called the Blue Zones) don't generally go to the gym or exercise particularly hard. Instead they are moderately physically active for extensive periods every single day. They generally walk everyone (usually with quite a bit of elevation on the journey), they work the land and typically sustain this into very old age.
Modern living does not easily facilitate a lifestyle like this so we need to get the same outcome from a different routine but depending on your goals, hitting the gym every day, is definitely not the only available pathway to good health.
In terms of the "when" question. More intense activity can "dampen down" our nervous system but also delay recovery during sleep. For both reasons the general advice is to carry out intensive exercise in the morning. This way you maintain a dampened down nervous system throughout the day (useful particularly when you experience chronic stress or anxiety) and avoid the inhibiting effect on your sleep of exercising later in the day / evening.
Watches with fitness metrics and exercise analytics can be a useful tool to guide your physical activity (e.g. daily step counters) and intensity of exercising to ensure you train in your optimal heart rate zone and do not overexert yourself. Firstbeat powers the analytics for most leading sports watches.
You may also find these Firstbeat blogs on exercise and fitness useful further reading.