Let's Get Moving

There are lots of links between physical activity and health (see references at the end).

We've recently formed a partnership of official and voluntary bodies with the aim of encouraging the people they deal with  to incorporate physical activity into their everyday lives. Quite simply this means walking or cycling for some, or part of, the journeys that you'd normally make by car or bus.

To bring attention to this we've produced a Manifesto for Physical Activity for organisations to sign up to and, so that the something actually happens as a result, make some pledges about how they'd put this commitment into practice.

We acknowledge that physically inactive lifestyles are a major cause of ill health and premature death

We resolve to encourage the people we work with to incorporate regular physical activity into their everyday lives and to work with others to help make this possible.

We believe that one of the simplest ways for people to do this is to walk, or cycle, for some, or part of, the everyday journeys they currently make.

Now it's possible to produce a list of all the diseases where the risk can be dramatically reduced - Type 2 Diabetes, heart disease, various cancers and dementia - but this doesn't explain why such a simple thing as having a regular brisk walk can have such widespread effects. 

So, I began to look at the basic science and see if there was a simple underlying cause.. 

http://dx.doi.org/10.1113%2Fjphysiol.2009.179507

What happens when you stop being active

So, here's the simple story.

Our bodies have a whole host of complex feedback mechanisms that allow them to respond to changing circumstances. That's why your heart beats faster if you start walking quickly, why your pancreas releases insulin in response to a rise in blood glucose and why you start to shiver when you get too cold. The detailed mechanisms of nerves and signalling molecules are complicated but they work. 

These feedback mechanisms have evolved over our entire evolutionary history, since before homo sapiens existed, and expect us to be physically active.

Physiology, which I once studied in rather more detail than I can now remember, is the study of the normal functioning of the body and physiologists have looked at the experiments carried out on either sedentary humans, or caged animals that can't move about much, and discovered that it's often the inactivity that's causing the problems not whatever else is being done to them. E.g. mice that have been genetically engineered to be hungry put on weight and show many of the early symptoms of diabetes. Put a wheel in their cage so that they can run around and these effects disappear. (Booth and Laye J. Physiol 2009)

So, what's normal for the mice, and what's normal for us, is to be physically active and it isn't difficult to appreciate the evolutionary reasons why this should be the case. 

‘The selective advantages of increased activity capacity are not subtle but rather are central to survival and reproduction. An animal with greater stamina has an advantage that is readily comprehensible in selective terms. It can sustain greater levels of pursuit or flight in gathering food or avoiding becoming food. It will be superior in territorial defense or invasion. It will be more successful in courtship and mating’ (Bennett & Ruben, 1979)

That's it. Your body has evolved expecting you to be physically active. If you're not, then the regulatory systems that keep your heart and circulation working properly, keep your glucose control system working properly, maintain your bone density, reduce the risk of some of your cells multiplying uncontrollably (cancer), maintain good blood flow to the brain and help wounds heal etc. can't work properly.

Earlier posts

If it were a drug gives an overview of the health benefits of becoming active

The cost of sitting around in North Yorkshire looks at the likely health impact in the County of North Yorkshire if we got more people moving.

Finally, a picture that illustrates how we've been normalising sedentary behaviour.

Done Walking, started dying