Dr. Steven Blair shatters the widely accepted belief that weight is an accurate measure of health, saying that levels of fitness are crucial determining factors for mortality rates.
Physical inactivity and low fitness are the biggest health problems in America’s toxic environment. We can buy food anywhere. We can click a button from a recliner to change the TV station.
Blair, president and CEO of the Cooper Institute, professor of kinesiology and award-winning researcher, addressed a room filled with 200 people Monday afternoon in the Masters Hall of the Georgia Center for Continuing Education Conference Center and Hotel, explaining the high risk of physical inactivity.
A man who smokes, has high cholesterol and has high blood pressure, but falls in the moderate or high fit category, has a lower mortality rate than a low fit man. Low fit men have the highest relative risk of death, as “low fitness is a powerful determinant of mortality,” Blair said.
Fitness levels are determined by integrated testing, using maximum exercise tests on the treadmill along with integrated oxygen uptake in the lab. Anyone can informally test himself by walking around the block and checking heart rate, then repeat. With time, it should take less time and the heart rate should lower.
To get out of or stay out of the low fit category, adults should walk 130 to150 minutes a week or jog 90 minutes a week. Taking three 10 minute walks five days of the week will move a sedentary adult out of the low fit category, or keep an active adult at the moderate fit level.
In moving from low to moderate or from moderate to high fit levels, a person of any age is cutting his mortality rate in half with each move up the latter. It is never too late to take up exercising.
Not only does a high fit 80-year-old have a death rate half that of a low fit person 20 years younger but he or she also has a fifty percent to sixty percent lower risk of becoming senile with age.
The same statistic is true for body fat and BMI. BMI is not important. Whether or not you are fit is what matters.
It is better to be fat and fit than it is to be a normal weight and unfit in terms of mortality predictors. You cannot determine how fit someone is by looking at them.
By always choosing the active of walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, parking in the first spot you come to and standing rather than sitting when talking on the phone, a person can burn 8,800 extra kilocalories of fat a month, which equals 2 ½ pounds. The little things can make a difference.
Blair ends with one piece of advice: “Remember to walk the dog every day, even if you don’t have one.”
Physical inactivity and low fitness are the biggest health problems in America’s toxic environment. We can buy food anywhere. We can click a button from a recliner to change the TV station.
Blair, president and CEO of the Cooper Institute, professor of kinesiology and award-winning researcher, addressed a room filled with 200 people Monday afternoon in the Masters Hall of the Georgia Center for Continuing Education Conference Center and Hotel, explaining the high risk of physical inactivity.
A man who smokes, has high cholesterol and has high blood pressure, but falls in the moderate or high fit category, has a lower mortality rate than a low fit man. Low fit men have the highest relative risk of death, as “low fitness is a powerful determinant of mortality,” Blair said.
Fitness levels are determined by integrated testing, using maximum exercise tests on the treadmill along with integrated oxygen uptake in the lab. Anyone can informally test himself by walking around the block and checking heart rate, then repeat. With time, it should take less time and the heart rate should lower.
To get out of or stay out of the low fit category, adults should walk 130 to150 minutes a week or jog 90 minutes a week. Taking three 10 minute walks five days of the week will move a sedentary adult out of the low fit category, or keep an active adult at the moderate fit level.
In moving from low to moderate or from moderate to high fit levels, a person of any age is cutting his mortality rate in half with each move up the latter. It is never too late to take up exercising.
Not only does a high fit 80-year-old have a death rate half that of a low fit person 20 years younger but he or she also has a fifty percent to sixty percent lower risk of becoming senile with age.
The same statistic is true for body fat and BMI. BMI is not important. Whether or not you are fit is what matters.
It is better to be fat and fit than it is to be a normal weight and unfit in terms of mortality predictors. You cannot determine how fit someone is by looking at them.
By always choosing the active of walking up the stairs instead of taking the elevator, parking in the first spot you come to and standing rather than sitting when talking on the phone, a person can burn 8,800 extra kilocalories of fat a month, which equals 2 ½ pounds. The little things can make a difference.
Blair ends with one piece of advice: “Remember to walk the dog every day, even if you don’t have one.”
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