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Some incentives to get off the sofa and burn a calorie work better than others. Here’s one that, for me, works very well indeed.

A team of British scientists analysed the results of 10 separate studies involving about 1250 people to try to determine what affects mental wellbeing. That’s a fancy way of saying mood.

What the scientists came up with as the best way to raise spirits was sweet: a five-minute walk in natural surroundings.

The type of exercise is not important – you can cycle or row or skate or jump on a pogo-stick – and you don’t have to limit it to five minutes if you want to stay out longer.

It’s just that, if you find a park or a beach, and do some exercise in it, it is going to lift your mood. And the biggest lift comes in the first five minutes.

The effects were stronger if there was water nearby – so the beach or a park with a lake is best – and the biggest benefits were in young people and mentally ill people.

Study leader Jules Pretty, of the University of Essex, said those who were generally inactive, or stressed, or with mental illness would probably benefit the most from green exercise.

Paul Farmer, chief executive of the British mental health charity Mind, said the research was further evidence that even a short period of green exercise could provide a low-cost and drug-free therapy to help improve mental wellbeing.

"It's important that people experiencing depression can be given the option of a range of treatments, and we would like to see all doctors considering exercise as a treatment where appropriate."

The research results were published in the journal Environmental Science and Technology.

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Exercise, Health, Psychology

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The Pilates Kid

July 9th 2009 00:27

I'm starting Pilates lessons this Saturday morning. I don't really know what Pilates is — this was one of those bilateral decisions which my wife made on a unilateral basis — but I intend to do a little reading before Saturday.

In fact, I'm looking forward to it, not as the start of something but as the continuation of something started in the week after last Christmas.

I weighed myself that day when it all started and the scales read, in red, flashing numbers, 109 kilograms. Here I was, 55 years old and the heaviest, most sedentary, laziest, slobbiest I had been in my life. Not good.

Today I weigh 101 kilograms and I'm aiming, ambitiously, to return to a fighting weight below 90 kilograms. My brother, who is the same height and weight and drinks far less beer than me, weighs 87 kilograms and has a flat stomach.

I lust after a flat stomach.

I miss beer.

I have lost eight kilograms partly by eating less, partly by drinking less beer, and largely by moving my lard out on to the nearby river pathway three times a week and getting mobile.

I have done quite a lot of running in my time, and many years ago ran four marathons. I am acutely aware these days, however, of creaking joints, fragile muscles and susceptible tendons. When I started running seven months ago, I swore to myself that I would take things very, very, very slowly.

It has taken more patience than I have shown for the sum total of everything else I have done in my life, but it has worked. I started by walking interspersed with two-minute joglets during which I was regularly overtaken by elderly trees. After seven months, I have built up to 75-minute runs, and I have also built up the speed to the extent that the only trees that pass me now are some of the younger, more energetic ones.

The weight loss has been steady, but more remarkable and obvious has been the inch-loss. The stomach is far from flat yet, but I look like half the man I used to be. It's fun trying on old clothes. If I lose much more, I can start trying on some of my wife's clothes.

Most remarkable of all, however, is the change in the way my body feels. I have lost 10 years. I get into and out of chairs without thinking about it. It had become a groan to get in to the car, but no more. And, most stunning of all, when I bent down yesterday to pick something off the floor, I felt nothing!

I have been bending down and touching the floor ever since, reminding myself what I felt like when I was younger. It never occurred to me that I could reverse the aging process like this, although I suppose the truth is that I'm not reversing the aging process, merely hauling back the accelerated aging I had manifested by overeating, over-beering and lack of exercise.

So I feel great because, through slowly increasing my exercise program, I have avoided injury while strengthening joints and muscles and all the other bits which help us move. And Pilates, as my knowledgeable wife has explained to me, is going to improve that process even more. That's what it does.

I'm looking forward to it. There's just one question unanswered for me now: when can I start drinking beer again?
image: www.balanceinme.com

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: 50s, Exercise, Health

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The long and windy groan

April 26th 2009 07:55

A deed of epic endurance and heroism has been done here this day. Despite overwhelming difficulties, I can place a tick in today's box on my exercise schedule. Or at least, I will once I get the frostbite treated and regain use of my right hand.

This is about extreme weather conditions. Himalayan climbers would not venture out in this. The weather in Melbourne is so bad right now that it would panic some of the hardier kinds of igloo.

It wasn't so bad shortly after dawn, when my wife left on a trip to Toronto. "Whatever happens here, I expect it will be colder in Canada," she said. Bah!

By midday, a mini Ice Age had settled over my suburb, and if I had known the hardship I would have to endure on my 80-minute walk and run along the Maribyrnong River pathways, I would never have opened the front door, let alone broken down the wall of packed snow which had formed there.

They might have tools for dealing with this kind of thing in Canada — snow dynamite or a lance-shaped bulldozer perhaps — but I had to beat my way out into the howling gale using only my bare hands and strength of will.

The wind! Tall trees bent before it. America's Cup sailors fled in terror. As I lent forward at an angle calculated to prevent me being thrown on my back, my nose touched the ground.

Why even go out in such conditions, I hear you ask.

Well, it's all my wife's fault really that, while she sat comfortably in a warm cocoon at 30,000 feet, I should be out in conditions which would have shocked Shackleton.

She pleads with me to exercise regularly, you see. She uses subtly irresistible arguments about health and life quality and her keen desire to grow old together. It's the last one that gets me out the door on days like today.

The good thing is that, being on a plane to Canada as she is, my wife won't know, when she reads this, if I have slightly exaggerated the conditions. I haven't, of course. Well, maybe a teensy bit.

image: gerwc.com

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Posted By: Chris Champion - Category: Exercise, Health, Vintage Sportsman

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