Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, March 20, 1990 TAG: 9003202401
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: E-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LINDA ROACH MONROE LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
If researcher Steven N. Blair sounds frustrated when he gives this earthy assessment of America's physical fitness, it's because he is.
Americans largely have ignored more than two decades of advice that they sweat their way into tiptop cardiovascular shape, the Dallas epidemiologist says, so it's time to give them a new message: A little bit of exercise is good enough.
And Blair really means it. With a recent study at Dallas' Institute for Aerobics Research as a guide, he has developed what he thinks is the bare minimum a person has to do to vastly reduce the risk of dying prematurely - and it isn't all that much.
A brisk two-mile walk three times a week is all it takes, Blair says. For men, the two miles should be covered in 27 minutes or less; for women, 30 minutes or less.
If you can't walk at that 3- to 4-mph pace at first, you can take up to 40 minutes in the beginning - but women would have to do it five to six days a week and men six or seven days a week.
Judged by the "aerobic points" system, which classifies exercise based on how much oxygen it causes one to use, that amounts to a minimum of 15 aerobic points a week for women, and 18 aerobic points a week for men. Other exercise adding up to that total amount could be substituted for the walking, he noted. (People under 50 need a bit more exercise than the minimum, and people over 50 can get by with a bit less.)
"It doesn't make any difference what you do, as long as you expend the energy," Blair said.
But that's about half as much exercise as has been advocated for the last two decades by Dr. Kenneth Cooper, the fitness guru who coined the term "aerobics" back in 1968. Cooper founded the Cooper Clinic and the aerobics institute where Blair does his research.
Cooper, who co-authored the recent study on which Blair bases his recommendations, agrees that it's time to emphasize that people don't have to train like Florence Griffith-Joyner to gain the health benefits of exercise. 3 1 EXERCISE Exercise
This new exercise prescription for the masses "doesn't even look like a routine physical conditioning program. All it really is is avoiding inactivity," Cooper says.
"I think there are at least 30 million Americans out there who are dying younger than they need to just because they're totally inactive," he said. "They say, `I'm not an athlete, I don't have time, I don't have the money.'
"Well, we've eliminated those excuses now. Because you don't have to join a health club, you don't have to buy expensive equipment, you don't have to have a friend or partner to play with you."
In a November paper based on data collected at the Cooper Clinic, researchers showed that the largest difference in mortality - about 60 percent - was between the sedentary and people who were only moderately fit, as judged by performance on treadmill exercise tests.
Over an 11-year period, the sedentary men had an overall death rate of 64 per 10,000 person-years of participation in the study. The moderately fit had a death rate of 26 per 10,000 person-years. Among women, the mortality rate fell from 40 to 16.
This translates into one to three extra years of life for the moderately fit, Blair said.
Furthermore, improving one's fitness beyond this moderate level did decrease mortality, but not by much. The high-fitness group had death rates of 20 per 10,000 person-years for men and seven per 10,000 for women.
In other words, especially if you're a man, you don't have to become an exercise fanatic to gain most of the death-postponing benefits of exercise.
To quantify the exercise needed, Blair compared the study's findings with the exercise records kept on people who work out at an aerobics center affiliated with the Cooper Clinic. How much weekly exercising did it take for those people to have treadmill times classifying them as "moderately fit" by the study's standards, he asked. The result was the recommendations.
A survey last year by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control found that only 8 percent of Americans get as much exercise as government health officials recommend.
That recommendation basically is that healthy adults should spend 15 to 25 minutes a day, three to four days a week, doing some form of exercise vigorous enough to elevate breathing and heart rates but not so vigorous that it becomes impossible to talk comfortably.
(The American College of Sports Medicine recommends exercise sessions of 15 to 60 minutes, three to five days a week.)
The survey found another 34 percent of adults were "regularly active," which the CDC defined as doing some kind of physical activity at least three times a week for a minimum of 20 minutes each time.
If that 34 percent exercised a bit more, and other Americans could be coaxed off their living room couches, there would be less fat, more muscle and fewer early deaths, Blair says.
by CNB