Rant on Federal Exercise Guidelines
October 27th, 2008 Posted by David Lemberg
I didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry. Laughing with joy because The New York Times had a lead article on 10-23-08 focusing on the importance of daily exercise. Or crying in frustration because of the bureaucratized and committee-driven character of these recommendations.
Soccer Kids 2004 - Photography by David Lemberg
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has announced new basic recommendations for exercise. Americans should get about 150 minutes of moderately intense exercise each week. Older children should be exercising about 60 minutes per day.
Well, duh! The fitness community – including Total Lifetime Fitness – has been making these recommendations for years. The Fed has finally caught up, provoked by the ever-increasing epidemics of adult overweight and obesity and juvenile diabetes and obesity.
To be fair, 30 minutes of exercise per day for adults has been the DHHS recommendation since 1996. Thirty minutes per day is healthy and realistic. These updated guidelines emphasize that a variety of activities may help people to meet their daily 30-minute goal. And to the Fed’s credit, strength training is included in the recommendations.
But the recommendations seem contrived and off-the-mark, concocted to cajole people into doing something, anything, rather than sitting on the collective national sofa, watching the latest reality TV series, and eating a bag of chips.
The Times article describes ways to “get in those minutes”, as if reaching the magic number of 30 really means something. “Aggressive scrubbing or cleaning of floors” may also be considered exercise, according to the article.
Well, not really. Exercise is exercise. Daily activities are daily activities. Pretending we’re exercising when we’re actually doing household chores may fool our conscious minds but won’t fool our physiology. Heart rates and blood pressure and fat-burning respond to real exercise, not to raking the yard.
The DHHS guidelines urge adults to “strongly consider walking” as aerobic exercise. This is great, but it’s very important to note the profound difference between walking to the store and walking specifically for exercise. The INTENTION to be exercising makes all the difference.
The Times article also talks about how children “can accumulate exercise minutes”. Reading this, I had a visceral response. I actually cringed.
Accumulating exercise minutes! Have we fallen that far? The answer, of course, is yes. OK, kids of today aren’t kids of yesterday. Yesterday’s kids played ball after school. Punchball, stickball, football. Kids used to play ACTIVE games, running all over the place, working up a sweat, and scraping more than a few shins in the process.
Those days are mostly gone.
So now kids have to “accumulate exercise minutes”. Very sad. The rock-bottom basis of our dangerous juvenile obesity and diabetes epidemics is right in front of us. Kids are not physically active. Kids don’t exercise.
So we need Federal guidelines to tell us kids need to ride a bike or climb monkey bars.
This should be so obvious. Parents and kids both need to be physically active, consistently and regularly. The alternative is continued increasing waistlines, continued disease and disability, and ever-increasing health care costs.
Our entire society bears the burden of our culture of couch-sitting and computer/video game-playing.
Enough. So ends the rant. Time to go to the gym and get in my 30 minutes! 
6 Responses to “Rant on Federal Exercise Guidelines”
Unfortunately these new guidelines go to show just how sedentary society has become. Not only adults, but children too. It’s extremely sad that we have to remind adults to get up off the couch and move for ‘x’ amount of time each day. Kids see their parents not being active so that’s what they learn too. How are they suppose to know any better when they have parents modeling this sedentary kind of behavior for them? What happened to the times when everyone played catch in the park, or went on family bike rides? Anyway … you already know my views on the rest of it
By Kristy-lee on Oct 27, 2008
Just like doctors have been afraid of recommending exercise and diet advice to their patients. When you go to a doctor, they only treat a specific problem. They rarely ask you about your exercise or diet. I think the feds has always been reluctant when it comes to making lifestyle recommendation.
By asithi on Oct 29, 2008
This post cuts to the core of a ton of issues. Things are not like they used to be and it makes me cringe too. When fitness is something that is dear to your heart and you have to actually ‘motivate’ and talk people into collecting minutes of it for their own well being, on a daily basis…it baffles me sometimes.
Fitness is fun, you DO NOT have to pay money to do it…it’s playing, it’s being a kid. It’s being fully functional as a human.
Great post.
By Rays Fantastic Fitness Tips on Oct 30, 2008
Great rant David.
And as Kristy-Lee points out, we HAVE slipped so far that simply moving is considered “exercise.”
While it’s tempting to always blame our increasingly sedentary lifestyle on things like television, the Internet, video games, whatever; the fact is that we’re less active as a society than our grandparents were because we don’t HAVE TO BE as active.
How many people grow their own food? Are in walking distance to their school or workplace? Have to chop wood to keep the house warm in the winter?
What we’re seeing is the downside of the march of progress, which has automated so many tasks that required physical, human labor in the past. Hell, you don’t even have to stand in a kitchen to cook anymore thanks to fast food and boxed/frozen meals.
While the US is leading the charge in this trend, Europe isn’t far behind. Eventually the entire world will be facing the “sedentary crisis.” It’s not so much a cultural difference as it is one of geography and technology.
One last thought. 100 years ago the idea that people would have to carve out 60 minutes a day to run on a treadmill or lift weights at a gym would have seemed absurd to most people. People were already so physically active just trying to live that to specifically go “workout” would have been an alien concept.
If anything, their goal would have been to enjoy some rest and relaxation … which of course, technology allows us to do. So watch what you ask for.
Cheers …
matt
By The Fitness Nerd@Answer Fitness on Oct 31, 2008