Pain before Breakfast

This morning I went to "Pain before Breakfast" - a 5-mile run that the JAGs, and any ambitious significant others, embark on every Thursday at 5:30am.  Not particularly pleasurable, but now that I'm working remotely, it's become more important than ever to build regular physical activity in to my day. 

                                                                                                                                                                                                                    Right up there with nutrition, regular exercise plays a major role in the prevention of disease.  For example, though it's not quite as intuitive to me as diet, physical activity in any form helps to lower cancer risk.  This finding comes from the American Institute for Cancer (AICR) recommendations for cancer prevention, which were released this time last year and will be revisited today and tomorrow at a conference in Washington.  A mandate to move more appeared again just last month in the 2008 Physical Guidelines for Americans from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).   The report found strong evidence for a link between physical activity and lower risk of several diseases including early death, type 2 diabetes, and colon and breast cancers in adults.  Active kids benefit from improved endurance, favorable body composition, and bone health, to name a few.

So how much activity should we shoot for?  Here are the HHS recommendations for adults aged 16-64: 

• Adults should do 2 hours and 30 minutes a week of moderate-intensity, or 1 hour and 15 minutes (75 minutes) a week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity, or an equivalent combination of moderate- and vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity. Aerobic activity should be performed in episodes of at least 10 minutes, preferably spread throughout the week.
• Additional health benefits are provided by increasing to 5 hours (300 minutes) a week of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity, or 2 hours and 30 minutes a week of vigorous-intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both.
• Adults should also do muscle-strengthening activities that involve all major muscle groups performed on 2 or more days per week.

I've got fish at least twice a week down, but have some room for improvement with these goals.