There’s no gain without pain — it’s the mantra that has men and women in their hordes dutifully sweating away hours each day in the gym. And with fitness the new corporate status symbol, few can refuse to subscribe to the workout ethic.
But it could all be a waste of time — according to Sharon Stone, at least. The 48-year-old film star has the sort of physique that shouts of hours with a personal trainer and an heroic workout regimen. But not for Stone the endless Ashtanga asanas, gyrotonic contortions and pre-breakfast runs. Instead she practises “integrative” exercise, in which she tots up calorie-burning activity without going near a gym. “I still do push-ups and sit-ups,” Stone says. “But I also try to do things such as walking up the stairs, and not taking a lift. I’ll also park my car farther away from a store so I have to walk a few steps more. If you keep it up over a long period, you don’t have to do too much.”
It sounds like disingenuous Hollywood talk, but integrative exercise — billed as one of the hottest fitness trends for 2006 by The New York Times and Los Angeles Times — is based on scientific fact. And indeed the experts are now lining up to extol the benefits of the approach; the US Centres for Disease Control and Prevention and the American College of Sports Medicine have already produced a chart of daily activities according to their calorie-burning effects. Meanwhile, Harvey Simon, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a former proselytiser for the benefits of aerobics, recently confessed in Newsweek that he’d been “wrong” to tell people that “prolonged, continuous exercise was essential”. He added: “You can reap enormous health benefits with no-sweat exercise . . . everything that gets you moving — from gardening to sex — can and will contribute to your health.”
In a review of studies he found that moderate exercise produced 18 to 84 per cent reductions in the risk of heart disease, and 18 to 50 per cent in overall mortality rate. Professor Simon has now published a book on the subject, in which he argues that the small changes do add up.
Dr Klaas Westerterp, a biologist at Maastricht university, in the Netherlands, agrees: he found that healthy, non-obese people who follow the integrative approach to exercise actually burn more calories than those who perform short but intense gym sessions at lunchtime or after work. “After a tough workout, people typically limit their activity in a given day and either go back to their desk or relax for the evening, assuming they have done enough,” he says.
So does this signal the end of the gym? Integrating exercise in this way is something our older relatives took for granted. What we have gained in convenience from labour-saving devices over the past few decades, we have paid for in terms of physical activity. Television has us tethered to the sofa, cars have replaced walking or cycling, and more time is spent slumped over computers than doing household chores.
“The activity levels of people in the 1950s was equivalent to walking three to five miles a day because they did not have the equipment and devices we have today,” says Dr John Buckley, an exercise physiologist at Keele University and spokesman for the British Association of Sport and Exercise Sciences. “The number of people participating in vigorous sport has not risen much in 50 years, but what has changed is the lack of short bouts of lower-intensity activity in our daily lives.”
Professor Simon believes that the solution is to “go back to some of the old ways of doing things”. People need to shift their mindset and learn to “treat exercise as an opportunity instead of a punishment”, he says.
Indeed, in several studies, James Levine, a professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic, Minnesota, has calculated calorie expenditure in movements that most of us don’t think about such as finger-tapping and praying while kneeling. Last year, he reported in the journal Science that fidgeting can burn up to 350 calories a day, resulting in a weight loss of 30 to 40lb (14-18kg) a year. According to Levine, the energy spent on such movements is known in scientific terms as non-exercise thermogenesis (or Neat) and offers huge benefits if done frequently. “The amount of this low-grade activity is so substantial that it could account for obesity quite easily,” he says.
Of course, integrative exercise will only work if a healthy diet is followed. “It is no good squeezing all this extra activity into your day if you eat more than you need,” says Louise Sutton, senior lecturer in health and exercise science at Leeds Metropolitan University. “But cut down on the calories you consume, accumulate more activity throughout the day and you are guaranteed to lose weight.” Getting that balance appears to be where Sharon Stone has succeeded. “I’m not a big eater and I don't drink alcohol much,” she says.
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“For most people it does not matter what the activity is as long as they are physically active,” says Professor Asker Jeukendrup, director of the Centre for Health and Exercise Research at the University of Birmingham. “A small amount of activity done regularly will have a huge impact.” To improve his fitness, Professor Levine has turned his computer station into a treadmill so that he can walk while he works. He has persuaded ten of his colleagues to do the same, claiming that there is potential to burn 50lb a year by moving, and is pushing for employers to create walking tracks in the office. “A powerful way of burning calories is to get yourself standing,” he says. “As soon as you walk at one mile an hour you double your metabolic rate.”
The fitness industry, is not, however, worried. As Howard De Souza, a spokesperson for the Fitness Industry Association, explains: “Our objective is to get people more active more often so that they benefit their health. The biggest barrier to getting fit is a lack of time and if the only way people can get fit is to walk to the shops, then we would encourage it. But we don’t see this approach to exercise as a competitor. Around 12 per cent of the population are now members of gyms.”
It is true that to achieve maximum fitness you need to workout aerobically but it’s getting moving that matters. In the ten minutes it took you to read these pages, you will have expended around 15 calories if you were sitting down, less if you were lying. Had you been walking, you could multiply that figure by at least two. Now, don’t you wish you’d read it marching on the spot?
The No Sweat Exercise Plan: Lose Weight, Get Healthy, and Live Longer by Harvey B. Simon, published by McGraw Hill, £12.99
The no-sweat workout
Complete up to 60 minutes of moderate-intensity activity five days a week — or 20 minutes of vigorous activity three days a week. A healthy balanced diet will help you to lose from 10lb to 40lb a year. To lose more weight, do an additional 30 minutes a day of moderate intensity exercise. To burn fat, do as much vigorous aerobic activity as possible.
Moderate activities (burning 3.5 to 7 calories a minute) include:
Washing the car. Vigorous activities (burning 7 calories plus a minute):
Lying on your back and bench-pressing your child. (Definitions of calorie burning activities from the American College of Sports Medicine and the US Centres for Disease Control.)
