Are You Exercising Enough? Revised Exercise Guidelines You Need to Know

• Worldwide obesity has more than doubled since 1980.
• In 2014, more than 1.9 billion adults, 18 years and older, were overweight. Of these over 600 million were obese.
• 39% of adults aged 18 years and over were overweight in 2014, and 13% were obese.
• Most of the world’s population live in countries where overweight and obesity kills more people than underweight.
• 42 million children under the age of 5 were overweight or obese in 2013.
• Obesity is preventable.

With such an invasive, global, and destructive epidemic measures must be taken to help slow the tide of this ever growing problem. A good place to start is reviewing exercise habits.

EXERCISE HABITS

Exercise has long been recognized as an important component of healthy living and of course body weight-management. Given the explosion of obesity globally and in Australia, and also the soaring rates of preventable lifestyle diseases such as Type 2 Diabetes, it’s imperative that nations of the world take stock of their people’s exercise habits.

Interestingly WHO documented that in Australia physical activity levels were sub optimal.

As a physiotherapist I regularly get asked by clients to share my professional opinion regarding their exercise habits. Many people are confused by the over-whelm of health messaging in today’s ubiquitous social media realm, and as a result they are unsure of whether they should be doing more or less exercise.

If you can relate than read on….

REVISED NATIONAL ACTIVITY GUIDELINES

In response to the global obesity epidemic in February 2015 Australia’s Department of Health and Ageing released an updated version of our National Activity Guidelines (2). The release of the updated activity guidelines followed what was a long period of extensive review that compared our previous National guidelines with those of other nations. The former National Activity Guidelines were also compared to recent research in order to determine the optimal yet minimum level of activity Australian’s should be undertaking.

As a physiotherapist I actively and whole-heartedly endorse all Australians to undertake regular exercise and physical activity. In fact our governing body’s positioning statement (the Australian Physiotherapy Association) says that as a profession we help people ‘Move Well, and Stay Well’. In other words as physiotherapists nationally we are united in helping people keep moving so they can enjoy and experience the many benefits of exercise.

7 TAKE HOME POINTS FROM THE REVISED GUIDELINES