From the research world comes more compelling evidence to be active …

Bike to work: It’s good for your heart

Remember when people didn’t have gym memberships, didn’t run 5Ks, didn’t sweat to the oldies — and not because they hadn’t been recorded yet? This would have been back when we walked to the factory where they had physically demanding jobs. When we were more concerned about how many $ our clothes cost, not how many Xs came before the L.

Turns out folks back then didn’t need the gym because they had physically demanding jobs, according to a study from the Chronic Disease Epidemiology Lab at the Pennington Biomedical Research Center in Baton Rouge, La. Their findings are believed to be the first to show that a physically active job — and walking or riding your bike to get there — do as much for a healthy heart as boot camp at the gym three times a week. The study looked at 28,000 Finnish men and 29,874 Finnish women over an average 18-year period.

While you can’t do a lot about your job — it either demands physical activity or it doesn’t — you can do something about getting to and from work. And that would be a good move, especially for women: While there was little association between heart failure and commuting for men, women who walked or biked 30 minutes or more to their jobs reduced their risk of heart failure by 20 percent.

More about the study here.

5 percent of us exercise daily

Hopefully, that last item inspired you to walk or bike to work in order to get your daily dose of exercise, because another bit of research, the American Time Use Survey, found that only 5 percent of us had participated in “vigorous physical activity” within the previous 24 hours. What were we doing? 95.6 percent of us were eating and drinking and 80.12 percent of us were watching television or a movie. 80,000 people aged 20 and up took the time to stop eating and watching TV to participate in the survey.

More here.

Yet those who do, thrive

From Mid Sweden University and the Karolinska Institute comes word that exercising regularly really does pay off, especially when it comes to “oxygen-uptake capacity.” And as we’re all aware, if you don’t have the capacity to uptake oxygen, your lifestyle options are limited.

This study focused on seniors as old as 90 who were active skiers (in the case of the Scandanvians studied, that would be the vigorous sport of cross-country skiing). Of the senior guys studied, the ability to take in and utilize oxygen was twice as great for the skiers than the non-skiers (basically, those 95.6 percent who spend their time eating and drinking and the 80.1 percent who watch movies). In fact, the older active skiers compared to guys 40 to 50 years younger who did not exercise. Muscle tissue samples for the active older skiers also were similar to the group half their age.

“The findings show that humans have a great potential to maintain a high level of physical work capacity and thereby better quality of life even at advanced ages,” says Per Tesch, professor of sports science at Mid Sweden.

More here.

(For additional evidence that staying active as you age is smart, check this New York Times article about how exercises to improve balance can have a huge impact on our lives as we age. And if you don’t think balance is an issue, consider this telling line from the story: “Unintentional falls among those 65 and older are responsible for more than 18,000 deaths and nearly 450,000 hospitalizations annually in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.”)

Perhaps the best reason to exercise (yawn)

Finally, a study from the Sleep Disorders Center at Northwestern Medicine has unveiled a new prescription for insomnia: Exercise.

The study was small — 23 sedentary adults, mostly women 55 and older who had trouble falling asleep at night. (Women tend to suffer from insomnia more than men.) The women were split into two groups: one that continued not working out, one that worked out several times a week at about 75 percent of their maximum heart rate. After 16 weeks the exercising group saw their Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index scores drop an overage of 4.8 percent.

Sominex? Zumba!

Read more here.