Women's Menopause Health Center October 15, 2006 Newsletter.

Even Accidental Exercise Helps Menopause Symptoms.

If Cathy Pierce can work exercise into her busy life, anyone can. This mother of four from Hoover, Alabama, also gives piano lessons and is a substitute teacher who recently marked her 39th birthday by completing a triathlon. And she doesn't manage all this by clocking hours at the gym or being a slave to her sweats. Instead, she works exercise into her daily routine-and loves it. She really does take the stairs instead of the elevator and even looks forward to mowing the lawn.

"I like the whole double-duty thing," Pierce says. When it's time to get the kids home from school, which is a mile away, they all hoof it rather than hop in the car The brisk 10- to 15-minute walk to and from gets her close to the 30 minutes of daily aerobic exercise recommended by fitness experts. Plus, she gets more time to catch up with her kids. "For me, exercise time is also family time," she says. A favorite activity is riding bikes together. And taking the kids to the pool means swimming laps, not lounging poolside with a magazine.

Pierce is what fitness experts call an "accidental exerciser," and she's not alone. According to the American College of Sports Medicine and the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) , accidental exercisers are living proof that you don't need to sprint long distances or bench-press major weight to reap significant health benefits from exercise. They find ways to get exercise in spare moments throughout the day.

"People can get obsessive about exercise," says Rami Odeh, owner of Formwell Personal Fitness Training, an exercise studio in suburban Atlanta. "They think if they can't get in a half hour or an hour, they don't want to do it at all."

But as Odeh points out, the CDC recommendation is that you accumulate 30 minutes or more of moderate-intensity physical activity over the course of most days of the week. That means a typical day could include a brisk 10-minute walk with the dog followed by 10 minutes of carrying boxes up and down your basement stairs and then 10 minutes of raking leaves in the backyard-all things you need to do anyway.

Accidental exercise packs many of the same benefits as heavy-duty workouts. It promotes weight loss and improves everything from cardiovascular health and bone density to muscle tone and mood. "The benefit is overall better health," says Kevin Jacobs, a professor of exercise physiology at the University of Miami in Florida.

You can add to the benefits by putting a little oomph into it, Jacobs says. For best results, you should be huffing and puffing just a little but still be able to easily carry on a conversation. So don't just wash the car, scrub it. When taking the stairs, step lively so you're a bit out of breath at the top.

Craig LePage, a personal trainer in the Charlotte, North Carolina, area who has written about accidental exercise, points out that it can easily help an adult burn an extra 100 to 150 calories a day. As long as other factors stay the same, that would result in a weight loss of more than a pound a month. "It really adds up," LePage says.

Best of all, making accidental exercise a habit contributes to the best sort of weight loss and health-the kind that comes from a permanent lifestyle change, LePage says. At first it may seem like a pain to walk to the corner store. But once it becomes second nature-and you find yourself doing it in a smaller pair of jeans-you might just come to think of it as one of life's little pleasures.

.

 

Return to the Menopause Relief Exercise Index.