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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello, everyone. Welcome back to the one day at a time podcast. Today's big question is, can you be healthy but sedentary? Okay. So in general, if you wanna live a healthier and longer life, you want to be increasing your physical activity.
Speaker 1:Pretty much sedentary behavior, sitting down or moving all day, is linked to pretty much almost every preventable cause of premature disability and death from cardiovascular disease to type two diabetes to depression and dementia. This doesn't mean that every person is inactive is unhealthy, but this new study wants to see maybe how bad is it, what's going on, what's cracking about you. Let's take a look into this case and see if actually if you are not moving but your health markers are healthy, is it eventually going to catch up on you, is it eventually going to cause some issues for you. So the University of Colorado research team recruited 19 male participants, no females, sorry, sorry for all the female listeners, this is a male only study. Anyway, nine of them were mostly sedentary and 10 were moderately active, which means they met the minimum standard for aerobic exercise.
Speaker 1:So at least a hundred and fifty minutes a week of moderate to vigorous physical activity. So a hundred and fifty minutes a week is like, well, two and a half hours, thirty minutes a day, Monday to Friday. So thirty minutes of walking with a decent pace, could be thirty minutes of cycling, thirty minutes of doing some resistance training, lightweight, not going anaerobic, thirty minutes on a stair master, elliptical, whatever it is, aerobic. So anaerobic is when you're really pushing it, in simple terms I'm using your anaerobic threshold, like sprinting, you can't do it for long because it's just not possible basically. So aerobic is mainly where you want to be when you're doing the training such as running and stairmaster, all these things.
Speaker 1:Anaerobic is I think it's 85 or 90% max artery type of zone. So they ran a few tests on the participants metabolic health at the cellular level. So there's going be some scientific terms here, I'm just going to try and convey it simply because that's what makes sense. We need to be practical here. So in the research, the researchers are describing it, and they're saying the mitochondria in your cells turns carbs and fats into ATP, and ATP is like the energy powerhouse of your body.
Speaker 1:You need ATP, okay? And this is kind of linked with creatine, that's another topic. At rest, typically a healthy person will use a higher percentage of fat for energy, whilst a less healthy person will burn more carbs. And this is because if a lower cardiovascular fitness, you shift from aerobic to anaerobic, okay, so when you go to anaerobic, you then are using carbs for energy because they're there instantly fast, you need them, so it's sprinting, and that's the reason for that. It's not that like, oh my god, they're going to burn more fat overall if they can do this, and it's not about that.
Speaker 1:It's not about that. This is about if you've got really low fitness levels, you reach your anaerobic thresholds quicker, so your body's like we need energy now, we glucose need now and you can keep going for maybe seconds to minutes longer before you are completely spent. Anaerobic, using more fat, fat turnover to energy is slower so it's in that zone that's more comfortable. Aerobic is comfortable, you're like, you can talk perhaps or just above talking you're like, an anaerobic is, help me, I can't breathe. That's not scientific like, but you know what mean.
Speaker 1:So a fit person cannot only train intensities before reaching their threshold, they can also move lactate out of the bloodstream more efficiently as well. So lactate goes into the liver where it's converted to glucose and go back into use for energy. So essentially, the fitter people here are utilising their body's energy systems more effectively, more correctly perhaps, and they're actually getting lactate through the bloodstream and they're not having this kind of negative impacts of reaching a threshold that is quite hard. So that's kind of the big differences so far in the study. The sedentary people were basically going into the anaerobic zone even before the test began.
Speaker 1:When they were doing this graded exercise test on the bike, were increasing attention until they couldn't keep going, so the least fit active person at a higher VO2 max than the most fit sedentary participant. Okay? So even if the most fit sedentary participant, wasn't doing great versus the least fit active person who was sitting at one hundred and fifty minutes a week of, aerobic exercise. And I think the difference is in what they're looking at is called blood lactate concentrations, where the inactive participants reaching their lactate thresholds much earlier, they didn't really reach a level high enough. Like I said, test started at 75 watts on the bike and by then, which is like warming up 75 then start, by the time the people that were sedentary reached the actual start of the test after the warm up, they already had reached anaerobic zone, so there's not much more to go there.
Speaker 1:So their lactic clearance was compromised, which they couldn't officially convert the lactic to ATP for energy, it's a longer cycle, it's tough on the body, it hurts man, it's not nice, not a nice place to be. It's really a matter of the body functioning as it's meant to be, the metabolic anomalies in the sedentary participants, so they were looking at poor fat oxidization addressed, low VO2 max, and we know VO2 max can be a test used to determine how fit you are your risk factors for cardiovascular disease. They're linked to things like type two diabetes and other diseases, so the key takeaway from this is that they're saying doctors should be more proactive in prescribing exercise tests, I think perhaps that's probably true, VO2 max is a test that's coming out that more people are going to do, but we really need to start looking at movement again, even though like Karl has brought these steps, steps is part of movement, steps for most of you can be this exercise, you can push it, you can push it. I remember when my father had to do these treadmill tests to check his fitness, man he was blowing on them, he was in an anaerobic zone and it's not like oh my god, he's only walking.
Speaker 1:Only walking for him on an incline was the same as me sprinting 300 metres or me doing a jujitsu five minute round with someone more advanced than me, and at the end of it, I am spent, I am on the mat, I can't move. So it's not about judging my maximum versus your maximum in this regard, it's about understanding how quickly do you get to your maximum. Okay? And if you quickly get into your maximum from a short walk up a slight hill, okay, fine, we're starting there, we move up. When you can do walking and it becomes easy, you can go for a twenty minute walk, twenty five minute walk, and you're finding it very easy, your breath is fine, you can maybe start increasing the pace of your walk.
Speaker 1:Now this is the entire philosophy of this app, okay? It's like we're not saying you've got to go into the gym and start doing bike and doing StairMaster and all these things. What we're saying is if you can get 150 of walking in a week minimum, and a lot of you by hitting your targets are probably reaching this, the next phase is once you've reached these steps and you're doing them consistently and they become easy for you, you might want to take a few minutes or five, ten or twenty minutes of the steps per day, increase the tempo of it or find somewhere where it's got more of a resistance, a higher hill or whatever, so you get more of, you're testing your body more. Then you might start feeling you're out of breath a bit and you keep doing that for a few weeks. Eventually you can walk at a really good pace, well, I mean you can probably be walking at a rather fast pace in the end and you're fit, know, you're like, oh I can walk well, I can walk without being really out of breath, my threshold for this is much higher, then you start becoming fit and healthier.
Speaker 1:Then of course you can join the gym if you want, can start increasing some walks into little jogs or you can start doing an at home workout or whatever it is. But the important thing is if you don't do any activity, so if you don't do any walking, your steps are 2,000, you're eating well, blah blah blah, you're still going to have worse kind of like a worse response than someone who does one of the worst people that does train. So in the study it showed that the least fit person in the activity group was still much better than the most fit sedentary person. Whilst it's important that we get our calories in control, and a lot of the sayings are the diet, your abs are made in the kitchen, there's loads of things, abs are made in the kitchen la la, for sure. Nutrition comes first when it comes to fat loss.
Speaker 1:But the reason steps is there for you to hit and steps is to be gradually increased is because of research like this. It's because of overall health. Daily life, look at each additional step as a win. Don't feel bad if you go for a walk and you're out of breath, think next time I go for a walk and I'm going up the hill and be a bit less out of breath and before I know it instead of the walk making me feel like I'm using most of my heart, time it's no problem. So after a few weeks you're like no problem on my walks anymore.
Speaker 1:Before you know it you want to walk faster. This is the cycle okay you can't you know you don't want to the scene here probably works you can't run you don't want to run before you can walk you know you don't want to go run-in the marathon before you go run-in five ks before you can walk the five ks and then walk a little bit faster. So these little tweaks you can do guys, they're exciting, they're exciting because training in itself, like weight training, resistance training has its own benefits, I've covered that on separate podcasts, okay, improved strength, muscle quality, functional abilities, all that stuff. Training, boom. Don't think of training as calories burned.
Speaker 1:When it comes to steps, think steps. The benefits from steps are all the things you mentioned today. You're making your body fitter through steps. Whether you think it's true or not, it is true. And that's the key part here, is to increase your fitness over time.
Speaker 1:So when it gets to the point where it's too late, like it was with my father, and they do tests because he's cardiovascular, heart failure and stuff, they had to see where he was and the test was like a treadmill test, right? And you had to get a certain level, you had to be at a certain level. So all of us have got to be at a certain level at all times. Don't wait until it's too late and they start doing tests and they go, Look, you're really not for beating these tests, you need to get there. And then in that position you're going to be way worse.
Speaker 1:It's going to be so difficult for you to even walk ten minutes, fifteen minutes, twenty five minutes. Then they're going ask you to walk on an incline, that's going be even harder for you. So start now. That's why your walks are important. Make walking easy, make walking great, make walking awesome a part of your life, enjoy it, podcast on blah blah blah, before you know it you're walking fit and walking fit is such a powerful place to be in terms of your health.
Speaker 1:As long as it helps you with fat loss, like I mentioned in the short recap, how is it helpful for fat loss? Well, walking gradually, you burn more calories walking and moving throughout the day than you do from workouts through the week. Okay, that's a fact. Walking helps regulate your appetite system because if you don't move enough throughout the day, you're gonna feel hungrier than you're meant to, you're gonna eat more calories than you need, and you're gonna be make it's gonna be harder to be in a deficit. Walking has been linked to improved mental health.
Speaker 1:Okay? Walking, get you out there, your eyes are moving left to right, there's a lot of benefits of walking in nature. Walking has got a a lot of links to improving mental health, and it does, okay? So as long as you can kind of go for it and sometimes at least be in nature if you can, not just like on a busy road. Let your mind wander.
Speaker 1:Go for a walk. Walking is linked to improved work performance, so they call it exercise snacks. If you can walk five, ten minutes every hour, you have less fatigue in work, you've got more mental sharpness, your performance is better, your thinking is more clear. All of these are linked, we're just moving the body, moving the mind, an hour every hour or so throughout the day. Really, really important.
Speaker 1:So these are all massively important. This study just goes to show again that you can't whilst you want to start with calories and protein and your nutrition, eventually you're going start thinking about those steps that have to be hit and increased. Because then once you've got those golden trio in place, that solid foundation is exciting for you to be at and then you can decide if you want to do more. Not needing to do everything, but then decide to do more. So get off your ass and start walking today guys, and enjoy your day and I'll see you back here tomorrow.