What is the single best thing we can do for our health?

There was an article on the BBC website this week with the attention-grabbing headline "Training very hard 'as bad as no exercise at all'". A Danish study looked at all-cause mortality in 1000 joggers and 3000 sedentary people. It found that joggers whose exercise level was defined as light or moderate were less likely to die than the those in the sedentary group. However it found that the joggers who were defined as "strenuous" were statistically as likely to die as the sedentary group. One of the researchers was quoted as saying that there may be an upper limit on the amount of exercise that is beneficial. It's worth pointing out that of the 4000 people in the study only 40 were categorised as strenuous joggers (two of which died) so I'm not sure it's fair to draw a direct comparison between the strenuous and sedentary groups. In fact the BBC article was subsequently updated to make reference to this fact, presumably after complaints from strenuous joggers like me.

There's an interesting TED talk by James O'Keefe, an American cardiologist where he makes a similar argument to the Danish researchers. He thinks that extreme levels of endurance exercise over many years may cause damage to the heart. He does say however that "There is no single step you can take in your life to ensure robust health and remarkable longevity than a habit of daily exercise".

So it seems that when it comes to the health benefits of exercise we may be looking at a bell curve. It appears there are great benefits to doing only a moderate amount of exercise and as you increase the time and intensity the amount of benefit levels off or perhaps even diminishes past a certain point.

The reason why I wanted to write a post about this is that I think people are put off by exercise because they think that they have to go to extremes to see any benefit. I heard a story about a woman who said she'd always wanted to go running 3 times a week but she'd never managed it. Someone asked her "Why don't you try running once a week?" and she replied "Well there's no point in doing that is there?". The point is you don't have to run a marathon to improve your health you just need to move more, every day, however you achieve that. It's a shame that the BBC article didn't focus on the positive message in that study i.e. light to moderate joggers have a lower mortality rate than sedentary people. We should be trying to encourage sedentary people to become more active rather than trying to scare people out of exercising.

I think this is summed up quite well by the photo at the top of this page. There's a Sport England campaign going on at the moment called "This Girl Can". The campaign aims to highlight the positive effects of different kinds of physical activity and break down the barriers that stop some women from getting involved in sport and exercise. The photo above is on a huge billboard outside Manchester Piccadilly station, "I'm slow but I'm lapping everybody on the couch". I think that's a great quote and I hope people find it inspiring.

If you need any more convincing check out this great video - 23 1/2 hours: