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"Gym’ll fix it? No, just reach for the stairs"

Lucy Atkins on a lifestyle approach to exercise that takes the sweat out of getting fit

It is fabulous news for those of us who have already allowed our gym-going resolutions to crumble: exercise is out. At least, exercise of the kind we associate with treadmills, boot camps and personal trainers. For a study recently published in The American Journal of Clinical Nutrition reports that three 10-minute bursts of activity spread over your day can have the same beneficial effects as doing 30 minutes of exercise in one go. This lifestyle approach to fitness, now called “Integrative Exercise”, was recently heralded by The New York Times as a hot trend for 2006.

Certainly, moving around more would be a good idea for most of us. According to the Department of Health, only 31 per cent of adults are sufficiently active to feel any health benefits. Indeed, our sloth costs the Government about £8.2 billion a year in health care, and in general we are now three times as fat as we were in the 1980s.

The notion of activity rather than gym-going is central to many recent diet bestsellers. In last year’s hit, French Women Don’t Get Fat, Mireille Guiliano pointed out that French women are never found on treadmills. Instead, they walk everywhere and take the stairs. This year, Naomi Moryama published Japanese Women Don’t Get Old or Fat, in which she says that Japanese women, with the “lowest obesity rates in the developed world”, stay fit by cycling everywhere.

Could this really be true? Rose Thomas, a British GP who lived in Tokyo for four years, says: “I suppose I was healthier when we lived there, because I did cycle everywhere. But I wasn’t any lighter than I am now. Japanese people actually eat quite a lot of fried noodles.”

Noodles aside, however, the general principle of integrating activity into your everyday life is officially a good one. “Five or 10 minutes of moderate exercise done several times a day will give you excellent fitness benefits,” says Simon Till, chair of the British Association of Sports Medicine and consultant physician in sports medicine at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals Trust.

“We are not talking about exercise, really, but simply being more active: doing things like walking briskly to the paper shop instead of driving.”
If you do this properly – that is, genuinely raise your heart rate sufficiently while you are being “active” – you really can give up the gym. Just three 10-minute bursts of moderate –intensity exercise daily, says Dr Till, “will improve your cardiovascular and respiratory health, lower your risk of diabetes and other diseases and improve your longevity, irrespective of whether you lose weight”.

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