Under-appreciated Green Exercise Estimated Reading Time: 4 min With so many in the population struggling to be habitually active, it is timely to ‘reality check’ the contemporary health promoting activities that have proliferated globally. Both the fitness and sport industries enthusiastically beckon people to come join them. Their pitches pale, however, compared to the …
Credit where you can find it Estimated Reading Time: 2 min, 36 sec Awareness of the importance of physical activity (PA) for health and wellbeing has ballooned thanks to various public health initiatives. That appreciation for the value of PA has however rarely translated into action, as levels of inactivity in most populations have remained …
Turns out I’m a bit of a research magpie. I pick up shiny looking articles and store them away – just in case! My nest was getting a little crowded, so I spent most of last week tidying up my inbox. There was a bit of rubbish in there, but a few things I did …
So much information Could I have been that arrogant, that stupid? Turns out yes I could – in spades! In fairness, I’d been raised on a steady educational diet where knowledge was king; knowledge was power. It never occurred to me that it could be any other way. Certainly, none of my teachers or lecturers …
I recently downloaded a PDF ‘Osteoporosis and You’ from the Osteoporosis New Zealand website. Fifteen pages of content, with barely half a page of non-specific exercise information, yet they somehow managed 2 and a half pages of dietary guidance for optimal bone health! I shouldn’t be surprised, but……of course, I still am! Disappointed, disheartened! I’m …
When UB40 sang ‘I am the one in ten’, the song was one of despair – despair at the then unemployment rate in their part of the UK. I happened to get really agitated a few years back over another ‘one in ten’ – seems a little ironic now for someone masquerading as a 10th …
I was doing some prep for a lecture last year. The topic, osteoporosis and exercise. I came across a curious suggestion in a paper by Srinivasan et al (2002). They tried some low-intensity loading of animal bone, basically by applying a bit of bending load to bones. In that context they found that the low …
With the emergence of the ‘Exercise is Medicine’ (EIM) movement, biomedical models of health have been applied to exercise and physical activity, with seemingly limited success (Halall et al, 2012). The value and benefits of physical activity, exercise, sport and recreation extend well beyond physical measures of health. The risk with medicalising exercise is that …
Sometimes I wonder about the supposed advances in sciences, particularly the rapid emergence of technologies, and whether they are often more problematic than helpful. We live in a world where we prefer to see things as causes and effects. Mostly we like to believe that when something happens there has to be an identifiable cause …
One of the things that really bothers me about the Physical Activity and Health movement has been their tendency to catastrophise inactivity. ‘Catastrophising’ is a term that seems to have come from psychotherapy, where it was used to describe a tendency to exaggerate the seriousness of a situation and to forecast an irrationally gloomy outlook. …