Do you find the guidance on increasing your exercise and making dietary changes can be overwhelming? I think it is a particular challenge to change health behaviours when you are sedentary and all too aware of how unfit you are.
So, in this column, I thought I’d look at how even small behavioural changes can make a difference.
What’s the least amount of exercise you can get away with doing while still seeing these benefits? That answer depends on how fit you are to begin with – the lower your starting point is in terms of fitness, the less you have to do to see a benefit.
So, if you’re someone who’s completely sedentary, then only a small amount of exercise is needed to see a reduction in cardiac risk. From a starting point of virtually zero exercise, an hour or two a week of leisurely cycling or moderately paced walking might be all you need to reduce your risk of death from cardiovascular disease by as much as 20 per cent. As you get fitter and increase the amount you exercise, the cardiovascular health gains diminish and eventually plateau. The benefits appear to max out after four to six hours exercise a week – with no additional gains beyond this point for most people.
The UK Biobank is a useful source of information for assessing the effects of small-scale lifestyle behaviour change. It is a large-scale biomedical database and research resource containing de-identified genetic, lifestyle and health information and biological samples from half a million British participants.
Using the Biobank, a study recently published in BMC Medicine found that tiny, combined changes to everyday behaviours could lead to a longer life. Researchers from the University of Sydney found the risk of premature death was reduced by at least 10 per cent if people took the following combination of actions: sleeping a minimum of 15 minutes more a day; plus adding an additional 1.6 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical exercise per day; plus eating an additional half a serving of vegetables per day.
“The findings suggest that focusing on combined small changes across multiple behaviours may offer a more powerful and sustainable strategy to improve health outcomes than targeting larger changes in an individual behaviour,” colead researcher Dr Nicholas Koemel said.
Interestingly, when they looked at individual behaviours they found that, compared with the combined behaviours, substantially greater efforts were required to achieve a 10 per cent lower risk of mortality. For example, as individual behaviours, this level of risk reduction required 60 per cent more sleep, 25 per cent more physical activity, while diet alone was unable to reach a 10 per cent lower mortality risk.
Chinese researchers, working from the same UK databank found that catching up on sleep at weekends could lower the risk of heart disease by up to 20 per cent. It is well known that people who suffer sleep deprivation during the working week “sleep in” on days off to mitigate the effects of sleep deprivation. Modern lifestyles mean many people are sleep deprived on work or school days, and try to “catch up” with compensatory sleep on weekends. And while this habit goes against established sleep hygiene advice, researchers from the National Centre for Cardiovascular Disease in Beijing found cardiac benefits in those who compensated with additional weekend shut-eye.
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Separate research with a weekend angle found that if you find it hard to make time for exercise during the week, there is a similar benefit to doing your week’s exercise over the weekend. A retrospective study of more than 37,000 people found those who did their week’s worth of physical activity over just one to two days had the same reduction in cardiovascular disease risk as those who spread their activity throughout the week.
And spending even brief amounts of time outside is good for us. Just 15 minutes a day in nature is enough to boost our mood, concentration and physical health.
