Physical fitness pays big dividends no matter your age or weight, Dr. Steven Blair, president and CEO of the Cooper Institute in Dallas, tells listeners at his President's Lecture Series address.

To improve your health, get moving, expert tells BGSU

The number one reason cited by Americans when asked why they do not exercise is a lack of time—we’re simply too busy, they say. And yet when asked how much time they spend watching television, they report about three hours a day on average.

“Three hours a day of TV but no time for three, 10-minute walks”—all the time it takes to raise one’s fitness level and dramatically improve one’s health, observed Dr. Steven Blair, president and CEO of the Cooper Institute, one of the world’s leading research and medical facilities for preventive medicine.

Blair was on campus Jan. 12 to discuss “Physical Inactivity: The Major Public Health Challenge of the 21st Century,” as the first speaker in the 2005 President’s Lecture Series.

Citing data from the institute’s Aerobics Center Longitudinal Study, which since 1970 has followed more than 80,000 patients, Blair told a standing-room-only audience that “being fit is really good for you, folks. And how do you get to be fit? Regular, moderate physical exercise.

“Avoiding low fitness is very important to avoiding common chronic diseases and improving mortality rates,” he emphasized.

“Unfortunately,” he said, “we live in a toxic environment in which we’ve engineered activity out of everyday life.”

Unlike in other countries, for example, American buildings tend to have stairways that are hard to locate and unattractive. Remote controls, processed foods, leaf blowers and other devices all contribute to our increasingly sedentary lifestyle. We need to modify our environment to encourage physical activity, he said.

“We have a big burden in the United States” of health problems related to lifestyle, he said. Twenty-five percent of adults are sedentary—that’s 40-50 million adults. “That’s why I say physical inactivity is the greatest public health challenge we face.”

The Cooper Institute recommends that all adults should accumulate 30 minutes of at least moderate physical activity at least five times a week. This equates to three, 10-minute walks, or going about a mile and a half at a rate of three-four miles per hour. One could also jog, do aerobics or simply do vigorous household chores.

“It doesn’t matter what you do, as long as you’re moving and spending the energy,” Blair said.

A specialist in cardio-respiratory fitness (CRF), Blair shared data showing that “most of the protective advantage of fitness occurs in getting out of the low-fitness category.”

A dedicated runner for many years, Blair said he formerly believed that people “really had to have a very vigorous exercise regime in order to be fit. But we have learned that moderate levels of fitness—achieved by moderate levels of exercise—offer huge benefits in the preservation of health.”

While most of the studies he has conducted deal with CRF, others measuring muscular fitness have shown very much the same results. “We’re going to learn over the next decade how important musculoskeletal fitness is in the preservation of health in addition to cardio-respiratory fitness,” he said.

It’s not simply living long that should be the goal, he added, but living well. “I’ve never heard anyone tell me they want to end their years frail, feeble, incontinent and in a nursing home.” It is important to be able to live alone and care for oneself. In one Cooper study, Blair said, women who had been tested at the center were sent a follow-up questionnaire a number of years later asking them to rate their current ability to engage in personal care, household and recreational activities. Startlingly, many of those aged 40-49 who had low levels of musculoskeletal strength already reported a loss of some function, comparable to those aged over 60 but of high fitness.

Those with high strength had a 45 percent lower chance of losing functionality. Both CRF and strength preserve function and independence as people move into the later years of life, Blair said, adding that this holds true for people of any size or background.

Even with diabetes, fitness improves one’s chances of living longer and more healthily. And fitness also trumps such negatives as smoking, high blood pressure and high cholesterol. A fairly recent development in medicine categorizes anyone who has at least three of five factors—high blood sugar, high triglycerides (a form of cholesterol), low levels of high-density cholesterol, high blood pressure (more than 130 over 85) or large waist girth—as having “metabolic syndrome” and likely to have a shortened life expectancy. But studies show that high cardio-respiratory fitness “provides protection and eliminates associations across all body mass indexes,” Blair said. In addition, high muscle strength appears to delay the onset of metabolic syndrome.

In epidemiological studies, moderate fitness produces a gain of six years in longevity, while high fitness yields an average of nine years. “For epidemiologists, these are huge numbers in terms of longevity,” he said.

“Fitness is incredibly important as a determinant of health and longevity.”

Is it possible to be fat and fit?
“Is it possible to be fat and fit?” he asked. The data show that unfit men are twice as likely to die young as fit men, “even among the fat group,” Blair said. “The fat, fit group had a better chance than the thin, unfit group.

“There is a correlation between fitness and weight,” he acknowledged. “Thin people tend to be more fit,” but “low fitness is a stronger predictor of mortality than overweight or Class 1 obesity.”

He said that, realistically, people who are obese cannot expect to lose a lot of weight and keep it off, despite their best efforts—research shows this to be unlikely. However, that should not deter them from pursuing physical fitness. Rather than being discouraging, “I consider this a message of hope and encouragement. You can’t make yourself look like a movie star or a model, but you can take an action that has important health benefits whether or not you lose weight. We have to get comfortable with what we have control over—our behavior. I can be in control of my health,” Blair said.

Simply by choosing more active behaviors over more sedentary ones—such as getting up to change the channel instead of using the remote control—adults can burn calories and build fitness, Blair said. “Remember to walk the dog every day, even if you don’t have one,” he joked.