In the last years the sedentary population is increasing in EU and that means, more people said that never practice exercise or play sport. Work, family, other hobbies… there are many excuses to be sedentary nowadays. Lack of time is usually a common pretext to not practice exercise, but…
How many things you must do every day that are more important than your health?
Do you really do not have one hour a day to care your health?
In 2012 Booth et al. published a paper called “Lack of exercise is a major cause of chronic diseases”. And it seems to be a really impactful health advice. But the most important about this affirmation it´s not if it is impactful, the most important about it, is that is true. Yes.
There a strong inverse correlation between physical activity and all-cause mortality, it´s the same if you are man or woman, if you are an inactive individual, you have a 30% more risk of dying in the future. It´s so simple, physical activity is related with lower mortality rates, for all-causes.
Physical activity is related with an increase of life span, around 2 years for males and 5 years for females. Maybe more important, high physical activity individuals spent less time disabled in their life and low physical activity groups spend more time disabled than the middle. So, it´s not only to live more years, but also to live with better quality of life, independent life.
Cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) is well related with life expectancy. Differences in CRF are related with risk factors, and not only in cross-sectional studies. Changes in CRF as response to exercise or disuse are also related with health risk factors.
Physical activity can be used as a treatment for some symptoms of many diseases. But is important not only the use of physical exercise as medicine, like Pedersen and Saltin wrote in the Scandinavian Journal of Medicine & Science in Sports (2015). It is also very important to understand that, exercise is a treatment to prevent many chronic diseases, but “is the lack of regular exercise or physical inactivity that is one of the actual causes of many of these diseases” (Slentz et al. cited by Booth et al. 2012).
So, I think it is clear, sedentary behavior is not an option, be active, be MemTrain.
Author: Diego Pastor, University of Miguel Hernández