Fitness Facts
• Seventy-two percent (72%) of women do not engage in regular leisure-time physical activity, compared to sixty-four percent (64%) of men.
• Strength training, including lifting weights or doing calisthenics, increases muscular strength, endurance and bone density.
• Thirty minutes of exercise a day can decrease the risk of chronic diseases including breast cancer. Coupled with appropriate dietary restraint, this level of activity can help overweight women lose weight.
• Despite well-known benefits of physical activity for older adults two-thirds are not as active as they should be. Individually tailored programs to encourage lifestyle changes in seniors may be effective.
• Treadmill fitness tests conducted 15 years apart found that poor fitness in young people was linked to twice the risk of diabetes, hypertension and the metabolic syndrome.
• Increased physical activity for a few hours a week is associated with reduced risk for breast cancer in post-menopausal women. More time spent exercising, even if not strenuously, provides the most benefit.
• A 20-year study says that increasing exercise levels may be more of a deterrent against cardiovascular disease than eating less.
• Exercise training has the potential to prevent or reverse the bone loss in postmenopausal women by almost 1 percent (1%) per year.
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