Healthy Activities, Healthy Heart

Healthy Aging

Let’s Take a Hike!

The American Heart Association recently published eight updated and enhanced health tips, called Life’s Essential 8, in the journal, Circulation. We are dedicating this round of newsletters to Life’s Essential 8.

What is Life’s Essential 8?

Instead of defining whether or not you have heart disease, Life’s Essential 8 is used to define whether or not you have heart health. Meeting all of these essential 8 goals is expected to help us not only have healthier hearts, they can enable us to live longer, healthier lives.

This week, let’s talk about:

A new approach to healthy exercise.

The American Heart Association provides a 0 to 100 point scoring system that is based on how many minutes of moderate-intensity activity you have per week. Since we all like As and Bs on our report card, here is how much activity is needed every week to get a healthy activity score of 80 to 100:

• 80 points = 90-119 minutes per week
• 90 points = 120-149 minutes per week
• 100 points = 150 minutes per week

So, what is ‘moderate-intensity’ activity?

We had the same question! According to Harvard, moderate-intensity activities are those that get you moving enough to burn 3 to 6 times as much energy per minute as you do when you are sitting quietly. These exercises clock in at 3 to 6 METS.

Since our fatty15 family is filled with overachievers, you may be asking, ‘But what if I want to burn more than 6 METs?’ These vigorous-intensity exercises give you extra credit. For every minute per week you do vigorous-intensity activity, you get two minutes of credit to the scoring system above.

Some examples, please.

You got it. Here are some examples provided by the team at Harvard.

Moderate-intensity activities:

Examples of vigorous-intensity activities:

So, check off or add activities, lace up your shoes, and aim for an A in physical activity! Stay tuned for next week’s newsletter on the latest scientific studies around healthy sleep.