Half of US Adults are in Pain and only 24.2% Get Enough Exercise

Today we're talking about exercise and pain.

Approximate read time: 2 min 49 sec

24.2% that's how much of the adult population in the United States meets the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans. That means 250,900,009 of the 331,002,651 Americans aren't getting enough exercise to stave off disease. Yes, you read that correctly 3/4 of the people who live in the United States don't get enough exercise to protect them from major chronic diseases.Disease avoidance is specifically why those exercise guidelines were developed.They weren't created to get your summer body back or to win a race. They were compiled by the HHS so that anyone and everyone could know exactly how much exercise they needed so they wouldn't die early.They are survival guidelines for first-world nations with first-world problems, aka life isn't physically strenuous enough, so we have to intentionally make it harder, or we die.What are these bare minimum guidelines?

• 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity per week

• 2 days per week of moderate-vigorous muscle-strengthening activities involving all major muscle groups

That's it.

Pain

We don't exercise enough, that's obvious, but what does it have to do with pain?Living a sedentary lifestyle dramatically increases your likelihood of chronic pain. This study found a 3.5-fold increase in chronic low back pain in individuals who led a sedentary lifestyle. Because low back pain is one of the most common problems for modern humans and cost the US 134 billion dollars from 1996-2016 (including neck pain), it's high time we started looking more at exercise rather than pills and procedures to fix our problems. Yeah, but that's just a fat American problem, right?Wrong!47% of the global population is struggling with musculoskeletal pain, and 39-45% of those people are in chronic pain.

Where to start?

If we're generous and give you 150 minutes to get your strengthening workouts in along with the aerobic activity, that'll cost you 300 minutes per week. If you sleep 8 hours per night, that amounts to 4.4% of your waking hours that needs to be devoted to exercise or about 43 minutes/day.Or, if you want to shorten your time, all you have to do is increase the intensity of your aerobic exercise, which cuts your time down to 225 minutes per week, 3.3% of your waking hours, or about 32 minutes/day.

What does that look like?

It can be incredibly simple

• Walk briskly around your block at lunch

• Ride your bike to work if possible

• Do bodyweight exercises like lunges, air squats, push-ups etc., all of which can be adapted to your strength/experience level

• If you want to take all the stops out hire a trainer to work with you a few times a week and program your other workouts when you're not with them

• If you need specific help with pain and you want exercise rather than meds to be a specific part of your rehab, I recommend Active Life

It doesn't have to be complicated; it just has to be sustainable. That's all for today!

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