Even a little exercise can go a long way for your health

Exercise. The more I read about it, the more I realize how important it is.

I recently finished a book, “Stronger: The Untold Story of Muscle in Our Lives,” by Michael Joseph Gross. He postulates, rightly so, that we often separate the mind from the body — as if your brain is just an independent organ on top of a robot.

When you consider this, it’s a funny way to think about what we do, but it’s widespread in so many articles, books and viewpoints. By the way, the brain is an energy suck. At rest, it consumes 20% of our calories. That means for a typical adult, it consumes about 400 calories a day.

That might seem like a lot, which it is in some ways. But when you look at artificial intelligence and the energy it uses, this is nothing. Four-hundred calories converted into electricity is the equivalent of keeping a 60-watt light bulb on for 24 seconds.

The brain is an amazingly efficient organ, but to keep it going we have to attend to our muscles. Study after study shows that if you don’t exercise, your brain suffers.

Now, I want to focus on looking at the minimum amount of exercise you need to keep your body up to date. There are people who are intent on maximizing their body, and I’m all for that. But what is the minimum you need to stay well?

That’s were an article in the British Medical Journal on women in exercise piqued my interest. Women who took 4,000 steps as little as twice weekly had a 26% reduced risk of premature death, and if they did this three days a week, the risk dropped 40%.

Let’s dive into the study. As you know, in this day and age — and for decades, actually — the information you get is sometimes good and, frankly, sometimes fake. Nor is scientific evaluation right all the time; it continues to change.

But if you go to a good journal, like the BMJ, you are more likely to get better information. That doesn’t mean it will always be proven right, but if it follows a trend, it’s more likely to be right than wrong.

We already know exercise is good, so what does this study have to offer that makes it worth considering? First off, it’s prospective, meaning they measured steps over time. It wasn’t a “look back” but rather a look forward. That is stronger research.

The study involved 13,547 women, with an average age of 72, from the U.S. Women’s Health Study. They wore activity trackers for seven consecutive days, from time to time over an 11-year period. All the women were free from cancer and any cardiovascular disease when the study started.

Over the monitoring period, 1,765 women (13%) died, with 781 (5%) developing cardiovascular disease. Clocking at least 4,000 steps a day on one or two days of the week was associated with a 26% lower risk of dying, especially dying from cardiovascular disease, compared to women who never reached that 4,000-step threshold during any day of the week.

For those who clocked 4,000 steps three times a week, premature death was reduced by 40%.

My spin: This is one more study that shows moving our bodies is critical in staying healthy and there are some minimal guidelines that may help. Yes, if you exercise more, as many do, then you’ll get more out of it, but for some people, exercise is just not something they do. This shows that even a little exercise can go a long way to better health.

The study aligns with other aspects of being healthier. You want your blood pressure down to 120/80 and your cholesterol to be in a good range, with an LDL cholesterol level below 130 and preferably below 100. And you want to be at the right weight, so you want to at least perform minimal exercise.

It’s just another example of something that might motivate folks to take action. Stay well.