Is 150 minutes of exercise a week good for health? “Personalized activity indicators” become the new standard!

Are Taiwanese people not getting enough exercise?

In April 2016, the National Health Administration of the Ministry of Health and Welfare announced the results of a survey: "Taiwan ranks first in the rate of insufficient physical activity." This study, which compared the National Health Administration with several countries from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), pointed out that Taiwan (76.3%), the United Kingdom (66.5%), and Japan (65.3%) were the top three countries with insufficient physical activity.

Afterwards, the Sports Administration of the Ministry of Education made a clarification, pointing out that the questionnaire used in this study only used "whether or not one had participated in sports in the past week" as a judgment indicator, and such a survey is prone to deviation! Some experts believe that daily household activities, work patterns, transportation, etc. should also be included in the calculation of activity levels.

Whether the amount of activity is sufficient will be interpreted differently from different perspectives. Some guidelines recommend more than 150 minutes of exercise per week; however, 150 minutes of weight training and 150 minutes of walking, although the time is the same, may have different physical effects! Moreover, for most people, going to work is tiring enough, especially for those who do heavy work. Where does the physical exercise come from after get off work?

How to assess activity level? How much is enough? For such complex problems, we can use Personalized Activity Intelligence (PAI) as a reference.

Personalized Activity Intelligence (PAI)

In the past, we often used (maximum, reserve) heart rate, maximum oxygen uptake, etc. to assess exercise intensity, and then added exercise time to assess whether the weekly exercise standards were met. The personalized activity index refers to personal information, integrates heart rate and activity intensity, and directly calculates a single value (PAI index) to tell you whether you have met the weekly exercise standards. In other words, a weekly personalized activity index of 100 is equivalent to approximately 40 minutes of high-intensity exercise per week (approximately 85% of reserve heart rate), or 60 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise per week (approximately 75% of reserve heart rate).

In March 2017, the American Journal of Medicine published a paper stating that "a weekly personal activity index of ≥100 can reduce cardiovascular mortality." The PAI algorithm is based on the HUNT study, which tracked people for an average of 26.6 years and collected more than one million person-years of data.

The conclusion tells us that as long as the weekly personalized activity index is ≥100, regardless of age group, the mortality rate of cardiovascular disease can be reduced by 17% in men and 23% in women. The overall mortality rate can be reduced by 13% in men and 17% in women.

Even for people who have cardiovascular risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, overweight/obesity, as long as they can achieve a weekly personalized activity index of ≥100, they will still have the benefit of reducing cardiovascular risk compared to people who do not exercise.

The study also pointed out that if the personalized activity index exceeds 100, even if other physical activity recommendations are not met (such as at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise or 75 minutes of high-intensity exercise per week), it will not significantly increase the mortality rate of cardiovascular disease; in addition, if the index is already over 100, further increasing the value will not reduce the risk any further.

Study limitations

The experimental subjects collected data are Caucasians, not Asians; we hope to have more data on Asian groups, or even Taiwanese, in the future. In addition, a single value is still unable to determine an individual's health status. If it is combined with medical history and sports records, it will provide a more comprehensive assessment.

Summarize

Personalized Activity Intelligence (PAI) presents the total physical activity in a week as a single number. As long as the number is over 100, it may reduce the risk of cardiovascular death in the long run. In the future, if we can make good use of personalized activity indicators and refer to medical history to formulate appropriate exercise prescriptions, it may be a good combination!

This article comes from: Ye Junyuan's Healthy Factory

※For more information, please visit Dr. Yeh Jun-kwan’s blog