Four Minutes to Fitness?

The media is often rightly accused of taking a bit of information from research studies and creating headline banners that are a distortion, bearing little relation to the original source. Never was this dearer than recent news reports claiming that you can achieve fitness without real exercise. The erroneous implication in some of these news stories was that exercise as we know it was unnecessary, even a waste of time. So what exactly was behind these claims of Four Minutes to Fitness?

Researchers compared the effects of counseling that promotes the development of an active lifestyle versus fitness counseling and membership in a health club in people who were very, very inactive. The 235 sedentary men and women were assigned to two groups and observed for two years. One group met with a counselor weekly and discussed how to become more active in their daily routine. The other group was prescribed a traditional structured exercise program at a health club.

After the two-year study, the researchers concluded that "in previously sedentary healthy adults, a lifestyle physical activity intervention is as effective as a structured exercise program in improving physical activity, cardiorespiratory fitness, and blood pressure." From that assessment some members of the media concluded that vigorous exercise is unnecessary for fitness and that those of us who workout are wasting our time. Pure bunk.

The media's headlines are wrong for two reasons. First, the people in this study were extremely sedentary. If you relied on the "activities" that these people built up to, the average runner would decrease their fitness level, not maintain it or increase it. Second, with exercise, more is better (up to a point). The study subjects went from people with major health risks due to inactivity to people with less risk. Runners, on the other hand, are on the other side of the curve. Your fitness gains provide a level of cardiovascular health and well-being far above the gains enjoyed by these research subjects.

So what's with the study? This elegant and important research was born out of the frustration of public health officials noting that despite all research linking moderate exercise with significant health gains, less than one-fifth of U.S. adults engage in regular, sustained exercise (like running 30 minutes a day). And that figure hasn't changed since the mid-80s. The vast majority of the American population is sedentary. The researchers recognized that the factors behind an individual's sedentary lifestyle are complex. For many people who occupy the sedentary majority, the idea of running four or five miles seems out of reach. The importance of this research is to make objective improvements in cardiovascular health and wellbeing within the reach of everyone.

There is no doubt that some physical activity is better than none; that more is even better up to a very distant point where returns can diminish as a result of overtraining. Sedentary individuals need to get the very reassuring message that real health gains can derive from simple changes like walking a few blocks, taking the stairs, raking the leaves, and pushing a lawn mower. For the rest of us, keep on doing what you enjoy. You're better for it!

(Journal of the American Medical Association, 1999, Vol. 281, No. 4, pp. 375-376,327-334,335-340)