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Laura Lundquist, physiotherapist and owner of Zoomers Physiotherapy & Health Solutions and founder of the Club Zed Fitness program joined Vassy Kapelos this week to discuss the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology‘s guidelines for weekly exercise to maintain health.
The Vassy Kapelos Show airs on Saturdays and replays on Sundays on 650CKOM and 980CJME.
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These questions and answers have been edited and condensed for clarity.
Kapelos: How much do I need to exercise every week to be healthy?
Lundquist: There are some basic guidelines that the Canadian Society for Exercise Physiology has put together that are readily accessible online.
There are some generalities that are pretty true across the board for adults aged 18 and up and for those seniors over 65. We divide it into different categories.
The first is cardiovascular health, or our heart and lungs. This is the kind of activity or exercise like going for a walk, cycling, swimming, dancing — things that really get your heart pumping. For that kind of activity, the recommendation for all Canadians over the age of 18 is two and a half hours of moderate to vigorous activity in a week, and that can be spread out across the week.
Better than doing one two-and-a-half hour hike on Sunday and then not doing anything for the next six days, sprinkle through your week in bouts of at least 10 minutes or more. People can do five 30-minute walks to hit that target for aerobic activity for example.
The second category is strengthening. In my experience as a physio this is something that is often missed by people as being really important to do on a regular basis.
It doesn’t mean strength training for a weightlifting competition, but it does mean working against resistance with the major muscle groups of your body.
This can include lifting weights or using resistance bands or big exercise bands, and sometimes just doing body-weight exercises like squats and lunges and push ups and those kinds of exercises.
We like to see people doing a minimum of twice a week for the major muscle groups of the body, and for how long depends on where you’re starting.
If you’re looking for basic strength building, typically, we would recommend people doing maybe two or three sets of somewhere between eight to 12 repetitions of an exercise —enough that you’re really pretty tired doing the last couple repetitions of each set, where you can maintain your position, but you’re ready for it to be done is the amount of effort each of those sets should feel like.
Kapelos: If you do the two and a half hours of cardio plus two sessions of strength work a week what is the health outcome?
Lundquist: Consider why you want to be healthy in the first place. Most of us know that doing exercise is good for us, but a lot of us struggle with doing it on a regular basis, and in the amounts that we know would be helpful.
If your goal is to be able to keep up with your grandchildren, it’s important to incorporate some walking, because those little legs walk fast. Do some walking in your aerobic exercise, then squats and lunges so that you can bend down, pick up, get to the ground and get back up. If you engage in a program that involves those kinds of things, you should see strength change within about eight weeks.
Kapelos: Do the requirements that you laid out apply to all age groups?
Lundquist: Both cardiovascular health and strength are important throughout our lifetime for different reasons.
Earlier on in life typically our bodies can handle working at a higher relative intensity because, we don’t have a heart condition to consider or something like that that might happen as we get older.
Vigorous activity is good as long as you don’t have a health condition that makes that unwise for you.
As we get older we start losing muscle strength and mass at age 40 but age-related changes don’t mean inevitable decline. They just mean we have more responsibility and it takes more effort to maintain our strength and our cardiovascular fitness.
Where sometimes in your 30s and 40s you might be able to get away with cheating — although it wouldn’t be advisable — as we get older, if we’re not putting those regular inputs into our body, we start to feel normal age-related changes are starting to make us weak or less stable.
Anybody over the age of 65 or anybody who feels like they have some balance disturbance, should also incorporating some stability and balance exercises to reduce the risk of falls.
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