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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Choose household chores, hobbies to help you burn energy

Czerne M. Reid The State (Columbia, S.C.)

Maybe it’s the thought of long, sweaty runs or hours of toil in a gym that keeps more than 50 percent of American adults from getting the recommended amount of physical activity. But people don’t have to work themselves into a lather to profit from being active, experts say.

“You don’t have to push yourself to get major health benefits – no pain, big gains,” said Dr. Harvey B. Simon, an associate professor at Harvard Medical School. “You don’t have to be intimidated, push yourself or run the risk of injury, but you do have to put in some time.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Sports Medicine recommend 30 minutes a day of moderate-intensity activity, for five or more days a week. That level of activity reduces the risk of developing diseases such as diabetes, high blood pressure and heart disease, research shows.

Everyday chores and hobbies can help people get the physical activity they need to stay healthy. Weight loss, though, requires much more cardiovascular effort.

Simon has several suggestions to help people become more active in his book, “The No Sweat Exercise Plan: Lose Weight, Get Healthy and Live Longer” (McGraw-Hill, $21.95).

He devised a system in which people can earn points for various activities, and they just have to make sure they rack up enough points at the end of a week.

Simon’s system assigns “cardiometabolic” or “CME” points for recreational and daily activities, such as walking, playing ping-pong, washing the car and golfing. People without special needs should aim for 1,000 points a week, for disease prevention and good health. For other goals such as weight loss, 2,000 or more points a week might be necessary.

How you earn points matters not. Pick the ways that are most enjoyable. For example, 30 minutes of bowling can earn 100 points; 30 minutes of doing laundry, 70 points; and hand-washing your car for 30 minutes, 100 points. One thing that makes it harder for many people to become active is modern technology.

“We’ve gotten so high tech, we forget we need to get off our chair and move,” said Dawn K. Wilson, a health-psychology professor at the University of South Carolina.

Wilson recommends building activity into everyday life in various ways, such as walking to work or school, doing heavy house-cleaning or gardening.

People would benefit from regarding such situations as opportunities, not as punishment, Simon said.

In his book, Simon describes various types of exercise that couple with “cardiometabolic exercise” and make for better health.

Resistance training with weights helps strengthen the muscles and bones; flexibility exercises such as stretching help to condition the muscles and joints; and balance exercises to raise the body and extend the limbs can – help lower the risk of falling. Aerobic exercise helps improve cardiovascular fitness, metabolism and muscle endurance.

Assessing risk for various diseases (using, for example, the online calculator at www.yourdiseaserisk.harvard.edu), body-fat percentage and cardiopulmonary fitness, muscle strength and balance before you start an exercise program will give you a baseline from which to measure your progress.