Exercise: A Program You Can Live With

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• Table of Contents
• An excerpt from this report

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What can improve your mood, help relieve insomnia, and lower your risk for heart disease, diabetes, high blood pressure, and colon cancer? The answer is regular exercise. It may seem too good to be true, but it's not. Hundreds of studies conducted over the past 50 years demonstrate that exercise helps you feel better and live longer. This report answers many important questions about physical activity, from how your body changes through exercise to what diseases it helps prevent. It will also help guide you through starting and maintaining an exercise program that suits your abilities and lifestyle. Throughout, you'll find advice on being a savvy consumer when it comes to fitness products, as well as useful tools and tips designed to help make exercise work for you.

Prepared by the editors of Harvard Health Publications in consultation with L. Howard Hartley, M.D., Director of Cardiac Rehabilitation at Brigham and Women's Hospital and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and I-Min Lee, M.B., B.S., Sc.D., an Assistant Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard School of Public Health and an Associate Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School. 42 pages.

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Here's an Excerpt from this Exercise Information Special Health Report

How Much Exercise Do I Need?
So how active do you have to be to reap health benefits? This is where things can get tricky. It's true that for completely sedentary people, any activity makes an impact. But it's also true that, up to certain limits, the more exercise you get, the better.

This principle was borne out in a 1986 study in the New England Journal of Medicine that analyzed research conducted on 17,000 Harvard alumni. It appears that the greatest gains, in terms of longer life and lowered risk for disease, come when you expend approximately 2,000 calories per week in some form of dynamic exercise, such as walking, gardening, or sports. Sedentary men were 64% more likely to suffer a heart attack than their counterparts who exercised up to the 2,000-calorie level. This translated into an average two-year gain in life span for the most active group. Since walking or jogging burns roughly 100 calories per mile, the 2,000 calorie threshold can be reached by walking 20 miles per week or its equivalent, an hour of moderate exercise five or six days a week.

The challenge is to figure out exactly what these parameters mean for you. For people who are mostly sedentary, walking or jogging 20 miles is a tall order. In fact, it's neither a practical nor advisable target for people who haven't been off the couch in years. The good news is that the health benefits begin kicking in at a much lower level - around 700 calories per week. This translates to logging 7 miles a week, roughly a brisk half-hour walk four times a week. For many people, this is a much more reasonable goal. Once you've reached this goal, you should aim to hit the 1,000-calorie-a-week mark (about 10 miles a week), since several studies have linked specific health benefits, such as greater longevity, to this target. If you'd rather not count calories, this translates into 30 minutes of moderate activity, 5-6 times a week.

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