Don't Sweat It But Don't Neglect It And Live Longer And Better!

Exercise - now don't let the word keep you from reading on because you are going to like this bit of news even if you're a total couch potato! Dr. Timothy Church, who authored the study in today's Journal of the American Medical Association, said dividing the exercise into short 10-minute routines improves health almost immediately. This is contrary to earlier government recommendations that call for a far greater expenditure of energy, Even lowly amounts of exercise as 10 minutes a day can improve overall cardiovascular fitness in overweight, sedentary, postmenopausal women who, previous to participation in this study reported yesterday, had rarely broken a sweat.

"For those who are super-sedentary, they start getting benefits right away," said Church, director of preventive medicine research at Louisiana State University's Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge. The U.S. Department of Agriculture, which designs the food pyramid, has added exercise to the government's prescriptions for healthy living. However The USDA guidelines suggest that 60 minutes to 90 minutes of vigorous daily exercise is what is required to manage body weight and prevent gradual weight gain in adulthood.

This is at the least 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity, above your usual activity, is required on most days of the week to reduce the risk of chronic disease in adulthood. The thing about the government exercise prescription is that it is basically for weight loss. So in many ways we're talking about apples and oranges," Church said.

He studied a group of 464 overweight and obese women between the ages of 57 and 75; 102 did not exercise. Three groups of exercisers were assigned to take part in low-level daily programs. Church and his colleagues found at the end of their analysis that peak oxygen consumption, a measure of cardiovascular fitness, increased by 4.2 percent compared with the group that did nothing. The exercise consisted of riding an exercise bike and walking on a treadmill.

Most of them were obese and at a point where their bad habits were going to catch up with them. Dr. Suzanne R. Steinbaum, director of the heart disease program at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan, said Church's study is good news. "Sixty to 90 minutes of exercise on most, if not all, days of the week is an overwhelming concept," Steinbaum said.