You may not know where or how to begin to start a regular exercise routine, or the best way to safely and effectively step up your current workout. Working with a Physical Therapist, an exercise physiologist or fitness specialist can help you with motivation and planning to reach your fitness goals.
In this segment, Gail Ericson, PT, MS, physical therapist with the Penny George Institute's LiveWell® Fitness Center, discusses exercise as medicine and the way you can use exercise as one of the best medications out there.
Exercise as Medicine!
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Learn more about Gail Ericson, PT, MS
Gail Ericson, MS, PT
Gail Ericson, PT, MS is a physical therapist with the Penny George Institute's LiveWell® Fitness Center. She enjoys working with a clients seeking services for a variety of reasons. They may be recovering from cancer, transitioning from clinical therapy to community-based exercise, or seeking a more active lifestyle. Ericson is a past marathoner who now enjoys yoga, strength training, and a multitude of summer and winter activities.Learn more about Gail Ericson, PT, MS
Transcription:
Exercise as Medicine!
Melanie Cole (Host): You may not know where or how to begin to start a regular exercise routine or the best way to safely and effectively step up your current workout but for women this is more important than ever. My guest today is Gail Erickson. She's a physical therapist with the Penny George Institute's Live Well Fitness Center. Welcome to the show Gail. So, when we're talking about exercise, people hear that word “endorphins”, the feel good hormones. What kinds and types of exercise create those hormones?
Gail Ericson (Guest): Well, typically, it's anything that's going to get your heart rate up. So, it could be strength training, if you do more of a circuit type of a thing where you're going to get your heart rate up and keep it up, meaning you're not going to take long extended rest between what you're doing; or, cardio exercise--something that gets your heart rate up and keeps it up for twenty minutes or thirty minutes at a time.
Melanie: What about mental health? As women, we're under a lot of stress these days, Gail, and we negative self-talk ourselves until we're blue and we're taking care of everybody else. What do we need to know about taking care of our self and using exercise as a way to reduce our stress?
Gail: Exercise is really important in managing our stress and just to keep us feeling energized. Most people think, “Oh, gosh. I'm so tired I couldn't possibly exercise that's going to make me more tired.” When, in fact, it will do just the opposite for you. It'll get your heart pumping, get you moving. That usually helps to release some of those “feel good” hormones which can help you feel better and more energized throughout the day in addition to many other things that it can do for you. It can help you with memory concentration. It's a great overall mental health tool.
Melanie: So, the American College of Sports Medicine has an initiative called “Exercise is Medicine” that's a global health initiative calling on doctors and people such as yourself, experts, to use your prescription pad to write an actual prescription for exercise. Tell us how you are implementing this kind of initiative at the Live Well Fitness Center and what you're telling clients about the importance of exercise as medicine.
Gail: Right. I do a fair amount of talking to people about exercise is medicine and really teaching them that exercise can be your medicine. It can be instead of taking pills. Of course, you always need to get your doctor's permission before you stop taking any sort of medication but it's very important to get that message out to people so they realize what it can do, especially for some chronic diseases. The hard part is the communication--the communication between someone like myself who helps people design an exercise program and the physician themselves. So, it's working with that communication to get the doctors to instead of them just saying, "Oh, you should get more exercise" to writing something specific down for them or seeing if they can get them off to a community exercise facility where they can spend more time with that person and really help them figure out “what should I be doing” because there's so much information out there that it can get kind of confusing.
Melanie: That's the whole key right there. People have been asking me for years and you as well, “What should I be doing?” When we tell them, when you tell them what they should be doing what do you tell them because they're looking at all this equipment, or maybe there's someone that wants to work out outside or at home? What do you tell them as their first best way to get started?
Gail: The first thing I will tell somebody is that you need to begin where you are. What that means is that everybody is going to be at a different place as far as their activity, their exercise level. Ideally, according to American College of Sports Medicine and American Cancer Society and all these big organizations, the ideal is to get at least 150 minutes of cardio work at a moderate to high intensity or 30 minutes five times a week and to do strength training twice a week. Now, that's a really huge leap for most people to take if they currently aren't doing anything or not much. We kind of talk first about what are you currently doing. Are you walking? Are you doing any strength training? Then, really making some small changes so that they can maybe maintain those changes over time. If you tell someone, “You need to go out and workout 30 minutes five times a week,” they might make it for a week or two and then they’re typically going to drop off and go, “Oh, too hard. Can’t do it.” So, really making sure we know where they're at and bumping them up slowly and adding a little bit of activity at a time.
Melanie: Can they do a little bit of activity at a time, Gail? Can they break up that 150 minutes that ACS recommends? Can they break that up into short ten minutes or fifteen minutes or do they have to do the whole 150 minute thing in one lump sum?
Gail: No. You can absolutely break that up. Again, that will depend on a person's level that they're currently at but yes you could take and do ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes, or two fifteen minutes. It could be dependent on your fitness level or just your time. If you feel like “I don't have fifteen minutes,” or “I don't have thirty minutes or forty five minutes to commit to exercise,” well, maybe you could do fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening. It's all going to be helpful. There's nothing magical about doing that thirty minutes all together unless of course you're training for something that requires endurance that you need to keep doing that exercise but health wise you can certainly break that up.
Melanie: Women hear bone density; they hear heart health and heart disease and breast cancer and all these things as we start to enter menopause. How can exercise help women in menopause because that's the time that they feel a very low amount of energy, their hormones are switching around all over the place. What do you tell women about the ways and the motivation to exercise as they're going through peri- and menopause?
Gail: I think first they have to know “what can exercise do for me if I am going through menopause”, both for the short term and the long term, because exercise can help improve your bone health. Of course, we start to lose some of our bone strength as we get older and start going through menopause. We start to lose muscle performance. We start to gain fat and we lose muscle mass, our triglycerides go up, our cholesterol goes up which increases our heart disease risk and exercise can hit all of those things. It can help to moderate your hormones, estrogen being one of them. Exercise, especially some cardio exercise, is going to help with decreasing your fat, that's where most of our estrogen is stored--in your fat. So, by working on cardio you're going to decrease the fat, increase the muscle, which decreases your oestrogen levels which, hopefully then, kind of helps you moderate possibly hot flashes and some of those other uncomfortable things that come along with menopause.
Melanie: It certainly can help with those things. Tell us about the Live Well fitness center and how a person can make an appointment with you to kick start their fitness goals?
Gail: It's pretty easy. You don't really need to have a referral per say to see me. I work more like a personal trainer might work in that it's an out of pocket payment in order to come and visit me. You would just make a phone call to the Live Well fitness center and make an appointment. We'll call it personal training. I do end up seeing people who have never exercised or people who have been exercising but because of a new knee that they just got or they struggled with some back pain, and so are afraid to exercise. Or, they've just gone through cancer treatment and they're a little nervous to start getting back into it. I can help you with all those things in addition to connecting you with some of the other practitioners here. We have a couple of exercise physiologist. We have a dietician and we have many health coaches that can help you make those behavioral changes in all aspects of your life, whether it's sleep or nutrition or exercise.
Melanie: Wrap it up for us then, Gail, with your best advice for women and men, too, about exercise and exercise as medicine, and this initiative, “Exercise is Medicine”. Put it all together for us with your best advice, what you tell people every single day about the importance of exercise and the motivation to get started and keep with it?
Gail: It's important to first of all start and to start where you're at. The hard part is to keep going. So, talking to people about using different thought processes and one of them is to think of exercise as your medicine, you wouldn't stop taking a medicine that a doctor might give you for a particular problem. Sometimes that's motivating for people to hear about it in that way that, “This is my medicine and I have to do this every day,” whatever that may be, and thinking about exercise in a different way instead of saying to yourself, “I have to do this.” Change your wording and say, “I get to.” So, it's a behavioral change as well and thinking that, “I get to do this and it makes me feel really good”. Even saying it out loud to yourself so it becomes more real, I’ve found this has been fairly helpful with people. The other piece is to physically write down your goals. If your goal is to six months from now you want to either run or walk a 5K, you write that as a long-term goal but then you have to take it apart and make it a little bit smaller so that you can say, “Next week I'm going to walk twenty minutes four times a week” and then gradually increasing your goal. So, to physically have something written down, too, is helpful for that motivation.
Melanie: It certainly is great advice and something that we all need to hear. Thank you so much, Gail, for being with us today. You're listening to The WELLcast. For more information on the Live Well Fitness Center, you can go to www.allinahealth.org. That's www.allinahealth.org. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.
Exercise as Medicine!
Melanie Cole (Host): You may not know where or how to begin to start a regular exercise routine or the best way to safely and effectively step up your current workout but for women this is more important than ever. My guest today is Gail Erickson. She's a physical therapist with the Penny George Institute's Live Well Fitness Center. Welcome to the show Gail. So, when we're talking about exercise, people hear that word “endorphins”, the feel good hormones. What kinds and types of exercise create those hormones?
Gail Ericson (Guest): Well, typically, it's anything that's going to get your heart rate up. So, it could be strength training, if you do more of a circuit type of a thing where you're going to get your heart rate up and keep it up, meaning you're not going to take long extended rest between what you're doing; or, cardio exercise--something that gets your heart rate up and keeps it up for twenty minutes or thirty minutes at a time.
Melanie: What about mental health? As women, we're under a lot of stress these days, Gail, and we negative self-talk ourselves until we're blue and we're taking care of everybody else. What do we need to know about taking care of our self and using exercise as a way to reduce our stress?
Gail: Exercise is really important in managing our stress and just to keep us feeling energized. Most people think, “Oh, gosh. I'm so tired I couldn't possibly exercise that's going to make me more tired.” When, in fact, it will do just the opposite for you. It'll get your heart pumping, get you moving. That usually helps to release some of those “feel good” hormones which can help you feel better and more energized throughout the day in addition to many other things that it can do for you. It can help you with memory concentration. It's a great overall mental health tool.
Melanie: So, the American College of Sports Medicine has an initiative called “Exercise is Medicine” that's a global health initiative calling on doctors and people such as yourself, experts, to use your prescription pad to write an actual prescription for exercise. Tell us how you are implementing this kind of initiative at the Live Well Fitness Center and what you're telling clients about the importance of exercise as medicine.
Gail: Right. I do a fair amount of talking to people about exercise is medicine and really teaching them that exercise can be your medicine. It can be instead of taking pills. Of course, you always need to get your doctor's permission before you stop taking any sort of medication but it's very important to get that message out to people so they realize what it can do, especially for some chronic diseases. The hard part is the communication--the communication between someone like myself who helps people design an exercise program and the physician themselves. So, it's working with that communication to get the doctors to instead of them just saying, "Oh, you should get more exercise" to writing something specific down for them or seeing if they can get them off to a community exercise facility where they can spend more time with that person and really help them figure out “what should I be doing” because there's so much information out there that it can get kind of confusing.
Melanie: That's the whole key right there. People have been asking me for years and you as well, “What should I be doing?” When we tell them, when you tell them what they should be doing what do you tell them because they're looking at all this equipment, or maybe there's someone that wants to work out outside or at home? What do you tell them as their first best way to get started?
Gail: The first thing I will tell somebody is that you need to begin where you are. What that means is that everybody is going to be at a different place as far as their activity, their exercise level. Ideally, according to American College of Sports Medicine and American Cancer Society and all these big organizations, the ideal is to get at least 150 minutes of cardio work at a moderate to high intensity or 30 minutes five times a week and to do strength training twice a week. Now, that's a really huge leap for most people to take if they currently aren't doing anything or not much. We kind of talk first about what are you currently doing. Are you walking? Are you doing any strength training? Then, really making some small changes so that they can maybe maintain those changes over time. If you tell someone, “You need to go out and workout 30 minutes five times a week,” they might make it for a week or two and then they’re typically going to drop off and go, “Oh, too hard. Can’t do it.” So, really making sure we know where they're at and bumping them up slowly and adding a little bit of activity at a time.
Melanie: Can they do a little bit of activity at a time, Gail? Can they break up that 150 minutes that ACS recommends? Can they break that up into short ten minutes or fifteen minutes or do they have to do the whole 150 minute thing in one lump sum?
Gail: No. You can absolutely break that up. Again, that will depend on a person's level that they're currently at but yes you could take and do ten minutes, ten minutes, ten minutes, or two fifteen minutes. It could be dependent on your fitness level or just your time. If you feel like “I don't have fifteen minutes,” or “I don't have thirty minutes or forty five minutes to commit to exercise,” well, maybe you could do fifteen minutes in the morning and fifteen minutes in the evening. It's all going to be helpful. There's nothing magical about doing that thirty minutes all together unless of course you're training for something that requires endurance that you need to keep doing that exercise but health wise you can certainly break that up.
Melanie: Women hear bone density; they hear heart health and heart disease and breast cancer and all these things as we start to enter menopause. How can exercise help women in menopause because that's the time that they feel a very low amount of energy, their hormones are switching around all over the place. What do you tell women about the ways and the motivation to exercise as they're going through peri- and menopause?
Gail: I think first they have to know “what can exercise do for me if I am going through menopause”, both for the short term and the long term, because exercise can help improve your bone health. Of course, we start to lose some of our bone strength as we get older and start going through menopause. We start to lose muscle performance. We start to gain fat and we lose muscle mass, our triglycerides go up, our cholesterol goes up which increases our heart disease risk and exercise can hit all of those things. It can help to moderate your hormones, estrogen being one of them. Exercise, especially some cardio exercise, is going to help with decreasing your fat, that's where most of our estrogen is stored--in your fat. So, by working on cardio you're going to decrease the fat, increase the muscle, which decreases your oestrogen levels which, hopefully then, kind of helps you moderate possibly hot flashes and some of those other uncomfortable things that come along with menopause.
Melanie: It certainly can help with those things. Tell us about the Live Well fitness center and how a person can make an appointment with you to kick start their fitness goals?
Gail: It's pretty easy. You don't really need to have a referral per say to see me. I work more like a personal trainer might work in that it's an out of pocket payment in order to come and visit me. You would just make a phone call to the Live Well fitness center and make an appointment. We'll call it personal training. I do end up seeing people who have never exercised or people who have been exercising but because of a new knee that they just got or they struggled with some back pain, and so are afraid to exercise. Or, they've just gone through cancer treatment and they're a little nervous to start getting back into it. I can help you with all those things in addition to connecting you with some of the other practitioners here. We have a couple of exercise physiologist. We have a dietician and we have many health coaches that can help you make those behavioral changes in all aspects of your life, whether it's sleep or nutrition or exercise.
Melanie: Wrap it up for us then, Gail, with your best advice for women and men, too, about exercise and exercise as medicine, and this initiative, “Exercise is Medicine”. Put it all together for us with your best advice, what you tell people every single day about the importance of exercise and the motivation to get started and keep with it?
Gail: It's important to first of all start and to start where you're at. The hard part is to keep going. So, talking to people about using different thought processes and one of them is to think of exercise as your medicine, you wouldn't stop taking a medicine that a doctor might give you for a particular problem. Sometimes that's motivating for people to hear about it in that way that, “This is my medicine and I have to do this every day,” whatever that may be, and thinking about exercise in a different way instead of saying to yourself, “I have to do this.” Change your wording and say, “I get to.” So, it's a behavioral change as well and thinking that, “I get to do this and it makes me feel really good”. Even saying it out loud to yourself so it becomes more real, I’ve found this has been fairly helpful with people. The other piece is to physically write down your goals. If your goal is to six months from now you want to either run or walk a 5K, you write that as a long-term goal but then you have to take it apart and make it a little bit smaller so that you can say, “Next week I'm going to walk twenty minutes four times a week” and then gradually increasing your goal. So, to physically have something written down, too, is helpful for that motivation.
Melanie: It certainly is great advice and something that we all need to hear. Thank you so much, Gail, for being with us today. You're listening to The WELLcast. For more information on the Live Well Fitness Center, you can go to www.allinahealth.org. That's www.allinahealth.org. This is Melanie Cole. Thanks so much for listening.