Friday February 7th 2025 is this year’s “Wear Red Day”, a day in which everyone is asked to wear red, to highlight heart disease, particularly in women. A critically important component of heart disease prevention, for all ages, is sustained physical activity, also known as regular exercise.
Many international organizations, like the World Health Organization (WHO), The American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM), the American Heart Association (AHA), has recommended that all adults should get a minimum of 30 minutes a day for 5 days a week of moderate intensity exercise to maintain good health, Getting more exercise than this can actually lead to improvement in health, especially cardiovascular health. There are also specific recommendations for children. Local organizations, like the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Barbados (HSFB), and the Barbados Sports Medicine Association (BSMA), also support these recommendations.
The most recent local major epidemiological study, the Health of the Nation (HoTN) study, published in 2015, found that 50% of Bajan adults over the age of 25 years self-reported that they did not get enough exercise to get health benefits. A sub-study, of HoTN which did not rely on self-reporting but attempted to quantify how much exercise people actually got, put the figure up to 75% . Three out of four adults were not getting enough exercise to maintain good health, much less to improve health.
So it is no surprise that, in a population that gets insufficient exercise, cardiovascular diseases, which includes heart disease and strokes, are the leading cause of suffering and death. And, if we believe the data in the Barbados Risk Factor Surveys, a series of studies done by the Ministry of Health in the 1990s and early 2000s, most people had no excuse for not exercising. Put another way, most people were ‘too lazy’ to exercise.
Physical activity or exercise can improve your health and reduce the risk of developing several diseases like type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular diseases, including heart disease. Physical activity and exercise can have immediate and long-term health benefits. Most importantly, regular activity can improve your quality of life. And as an old slogan says, “just do it”.
If you don’t have cardiovascular disease, or certain cancers, regular exercise can go a long way to helping you avoid them. In healthy persons, regular exercise can make you feel more energetic in the day, and help you sleep better at night. If you are unfortunate enough to be affected by any of these conditions, regular exercise is an important part of the treatment.
One can get health benefits from participating in sport: walking, jogging, running, skipping, cycling, swimming or participating in team sports. One can get health benefits by doing activity around the home: cutting the hedge, mowing the lawn, raking up leaves, sweeping the driveway. Recreational activities? One can go on regular walks or hikes join a dancing group, join a gym, or, in the safety of your home, you can exercise with one of many exercise instructors that lead sessions on the television.
So if you think avoiding a heart attack or a stroke is important, get out and sweat. If you don’t want to spend hours in the Emergency Room, get out and sweat. Not anxious to take up permanent residency in your local cemetery, get out and sweat. Don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend in the Cardiologist’s office, or on heart medication, then you know what to do. And ‘being too lazy’ is not an option.
