The Truth about Getting Fit

[AleisterCrowley]

two minutes of exercise is all a person needs each week
Hmm , sounds a bit dubious, but it's Dr Mosley who is normally very good so must be something in it.

Not having a TV licence I'll look forward to the review...

[AleisterCrowley]

One needs a licence for iPlayer now - someone will stick it on You Tube probably

I run up my stairs more than three times a week (second floor so > 20 seconds)
Don't seem to be a top athlete yet, in fact I've been getting a tight chest and dizziness since end of last year. Must get myself down the quack before I expire...

[kempiejon]

It'll be on iplayer AC. If its the same as the last programme, it was 3 x 20 second absolute thrashes on an exercise bike and that was enough to stablise his blood sugar and increase his VO2 max (something to do with oxygen capacity)

Am I mis-remembering didn't one have to have the right genes too?

[AleisterCrowley]

I'm definitely a 'non-responder'. Particularly first thing in the morning

[bungeejumper]

If I'm reading the BBC link correctly, it isn't 3 x 20 seconds a day, it's 3 x 10 minutes of brisk walking. Or, they say, about a mile and a half a day.

My doc told me a long time ago that, for the over-50s, a mile a day was probably enough. Some days we do ten miles of proper walking, and other days hardly any at all. But the wife got a pedometer recently and discovered that she was already doing 4000 steps a day, just in moving around the house and garden. I'd guess that we each climb 100 stairs a day, usually at a fairly hammering pace. It's funny how that doesn't feel like exercise.

BJ

[AleisterCrowley]

If I go into the office it involves 3 miles of walking, split up 0.75 >>train>>0.75 then reverse.
The briskness of the walk depends on how late I'm running.
Even the round trip to Sainsbury's is 1.7 miles.

I still feel like death...

[redsturgeon]

If I'm reading the BBC link correctly, it isn't 3 x 20 seconds a day, it's 3 x 10 minutes of brisk walking. Or, they say, about a mile and a half a day.


BJ

Two separate things, one is the 3x20 second high intensity training ( this is training at your maximum effort) and the other is the Action 10 recommended by Public Health England which requires 3 x 10 minutes of brisk walking per day.

John

[bungeejumper]

Two separate things, one is the 3x20 second high intensity training ( this is training at your maximum effort) and the other is the Action 10 recommended by Public Health England which requires 3 x 10 minutes of brisk walking per day.

You are of course right. My bad, for jumping to conclusions. I have to say, this was one of Mosley's less gripping programmes (I'm glad you said that, Snorvey), apart from the bit where he said he hated the gym.

We took my wife's car in for a service yesterday. It's a three mile walk back home after dropping it off, but this time we wimped out and did the two-car shuffle instead. Too flipping arctic in that wind.

BJ

[bungeejumper]

Incidentally, has anybody tried the 10 sitting squats thing yet? I'll give it a go, honestly I will, but not while I'm wearing these tight trousers.

BJ

[redsturgeon]

Incidentally, has anybody tried the 10 sitting squats thing yet? I'll give it a go, honestly I will, but not while I'm wearing these tight trousers.

BJ

Just tried it...9.97 seconds

John

[bungeejumper]

Just tried it...9.97 seconds

Rotten show-off. You measure your squats in hundredths of a second?

BJ

[redsturgeon]

Just tried it...9.97 seconds

Rotten show-off. You measure your squats in hundredths of a second?

BJ

Sounds so much better than 10 seconds

John

[Dod101]

I do not know about anyone else but I got tired watching it.,

Dod

[bungeejumper]

I finally got round to doing the ten sitting squats thing this morning. Blimey, I did them in ten seconds flat. Twice! (I didn't believe my timekeeping the first time.) Not too bad, considering that one of my lungs is only at 70 percent from old pneumonia damage. Mind you, I had removed my trousers so as to avert any (ahem) pressing concerns in the crown jewels department, so maybe that would be considered unacceptable performance enhancement?

So let's see, according to Mosley ten secs would have been about right for an under-35 year old. Flipping heck, I'm almost half the man I ought to be!

Seriously, I think I may have stumbled upon the secret of eternal youth. Act like a teenager and keep your trousers down around your ankles.

BJ

[kogsawelly]

With a name like bungeejumper, no wonder you were quick

[GeoffF100]

My doc told me a long time ago that, for the over-50s, a mile a day was probably enough.

I expect that your doc was a couch potato who had not looked at the research, e.g see:

http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199801083380204

[bungeejumper]

My doc told me a long time ago that, for the over-50s, a mile a day was probably enough.

I expect that your doc was a couch potato who had not looked at the research, e.g see:

http://www.nejm.org/doi/pdf/10.1056/NEJM199801083380204

Hardly. She's a fifty-something scuba diver, and in very fine shape (if I'm allowed to say so). And no, twenty year old data (for 61 to 81 year olds) from the Honolulu Heart program (I presume you read that bit? )doesn't exactly fill me with confidence that we're really comparing apples with apples.

A mile a day is a brisk twenty minutes, which is better than most people of later middle age manage. Michael Mosley is currently recommending 1.5 miles a day for all ages. Your views might vary, of course. Don't let a completely unrepresentative data sample from fat American men in Hawaiian floral shirts put you off.

BJ

[GeoffF100]

You will find lots of other stuff if you search for it. I cannot find a reference, but there was an interesting study in Japan, of elderly men walking 1 mile, 2 miles and 3 miles a day. Mortality dropped with each mile walked. Evolution did not design us to be couch potatoes. Here is another study:

https://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/842901#vp_2

None of these studies is particularly reliable. They are invariably based on reported levels of exercise, for example. Anyone who has struggled to give sensible answers to the Biobank questions will know how unreliable that is. Nonetheless, there is a clear overall picture.

All too often, wishful thinking spreads like wildfire, and cold reality goes in one ear and out of the other.

[GeoffF100]

Here is a study from Japan, but probably not the same one:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4626390/

Again, much the same result.

[bungeejumper]

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4626390/

Again, much the same result.

LOL, peace, bro. I wouldn't take much convincing that the general drift of your argument is correct - namely, that the more exercise the better. But Mosley is challenging some of the orthodoxy about the quantity of walking required for good/adequate health - personally, I thought he did a pretty good hatchet job on the ten thousand steps criterion, which was originally recommended by precisely nobody! (Rather like the thing about drinking 2 litres of water a day, which was something to do with wartime strategic planning, and not with health at all. Or the BMI criterion, which was never intended to be applied to individuals, but only to large population groups.)

It's essential to take every new medical pronouncement with a substantial pinch of what may (or may not) be salt. There'll always be somebody with an axe to grind, or maybe somebody whose bio-research department is in need of a shock headline that will secure its next round of funding. But in the meantime, if we Fools can perhaps refrain from calling each other's medics couch potatoes on the basis of precisely zero acquaintance, that would be an advance. Seem reasonable?

BJ