Active Living Every Day, 3rd Edition
Visit the link below to download the full version of this book:
https://medipdf.com/product/active-living-every-day-3rd-edition/
Click Download Now
Active Living Every Day
Third Edition
Steven N. Blair, PED
Andrea L. Dunn, PhD
Bess H. Marcus, PhD
Ruth Ann Carpenter, MS, RDN
Peter Jaret, MA
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Blair, Steven N., author.
Title: Active living every day / Steven N. Blair, Andrea L. Dunn, Bess H. Marcus, Ruth Ann
Carpenter, Peter Jaret.
Description: Third edition. | Champaign, IL : Human Kinetics, 2021. | Includes bibliographical
references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020005952 (print) | LCCN 2020005953 (ebook) | ISBN 9781492597148
(paperback) | ISBN 9781492597155 (epub) | ISBN 9781492597162 (pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Exercise. | Physical fitness. | Health.
Classification: LCC RA781 .A196 2021 (print) | LCC RA781 (ebook) | DDC 613.7/1--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005952
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020005953
ISBN: 978-1-4925-9714-8 (print)
Copyright © 2021, 2011, 2001 by Steven N. Blair, Andrea L. Dunn, Bess H. Marcus, Ruth Ann
Carpenter, Peter Jaret
Human Kinetics supports copyright. Copyright fuels scientific and artistic endeavor, encourages
authors to create new works, and promotes free speech. Thank you for buying an authorized edition
of this work and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any
part of it in any form without written permission from the publisher. You are supporting authors and
allowing Human Kinetics to continue to publish works that increase the knowledge, enhance the
performance, and improve the lives of people all over the world.
Notwithstanding the above notice, permission to reproduce the following material is granted to
persons and agencies who have purchased this work: pp. 3, 5, 7, 8, 15, 16, 17, 19, 22, 27, 28, 30, 36,
39, 41, 42, 48, 49, 51, 52, 54-55, 57, 60-62, 68, 69, 74, 81-82, 83, 86, 93, 94, 95, 101, 106, 108, 109,
111, 117, 123, 129, 132, 133, 136, 137, 140, 143-144, 148-149, 149-150, 150-151, 152, 161-164.
To report suspected copyright infringement of content published by Human Kinetics, contact us at
[email protected]. To request permission to legally reuse content published by Human
Kinetics, please refer to the information at https://US.HumanKinetics.com/pages/permissions-
information.
This publication is written and published to provide accurate and authoritative information relevant
to the subject matter presented. It is published and sold with the understanding that the author and
publisher are not engaged in rendering legal, medical, or other professional services by reason of
their authorship or publication of this work. If medical or other expert assistance is required, the
services of a competent professional person should be sought.
The web addresses cited in this text were current as of April 2020, unless otherwise noted.
Senior Acquisitions Editor: Michelle Maloney; Developmental Editor: Anne Hall; Managing
Editor: Hannah Werner; Copyeditor: Laura Stoffel; Indexer: Nancy Ball; Permissions Manager:
Martha Gullo; Senior Graphic Designer: Nancy Rasmus; Cover Designer: Keri Evans; Cover
Design Specialist: Susan Rothermel Allen; Photographs (cover): kali9/E+/Getty Images; Asia
Images Group / Getty Images; SPmemory /iStock/Getty Images; SPmemory /iStock/Getty Images;
WHL / Getty Images; DragonImages /iStock/Getty Images; Photographs (interior): © Human
Kinetics, unless otherwise noted; Photo Asset Manager: Laura Fitch; Photo Production Manager:
Jason Allen; Senior Art Manager: Kelly Hendren; Printer: Walsworth
Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The paper in this book was manufactured using responsible forestry methods.
Human Kinetics
1607 N. Market Street
Champaign, IL 61820
USA
United States and International
Website: US.HumanKinetics.com
Email:
[email protected]Phone: 1-800-747-4457
Canada
Website: Canada.HumanKinetics.com
Email:
[email protected] E8040
Contents
You’ve Come to the Right Place!
Acknowledgments
Session One Ready, Set, Go
Understanding lifestyle change, discovering how you spend
your time, and finding opportunities for physical activity
Session Two Finding Opportunities for Activity
Increasing activity and intensity levels, understanding health
benefits, and creating your activity plan
Session Three Overcoming Challenges
Knowing your challenges for being active every day, reviewing
your physical activity benefits, and practicing the art of problem
solving
Session Four Setting Goals and Rewards
Setting goals and identifying rewards that will help you stay
motivated, and creating positive messages to encourage
yourself
Session Five Gaining Confidence
Determining the caloric expenditure for different activities,
replacing negative thoughts with positive messages, and
turning errands into opportunities for activity
Session Six Enlisting Support
Turning to friends and family for encouragement and support,
exploring ways to ask for help, assessing your progress, and
identifying the four components of fitness
Session Seven Avoiding Pitfalls
Recognizing all-or-nothing traps, identifying pitfalls that can trip
you up, and planning for high-risk situations
Session Eight Step by Step
Learning to use a step counter or fitness tracker, keeping a
weekly log of your activities, and resetting your goals and
rewards
Session Nine Defusing Stress
Identifying the risks of stress and how to cope with it, and
finding effective ways to manage your time
Session Ten Finding New Opportunities to Be Active
Exploring new ways to be active, selecting in-home exercise
equipment, and adding extra activities to your weekly calendar
Session Eleven Positive Planning
Staying on track with being active, setting realistic goals for
weight loss, and looking back at your activity changes
Session Twelve Making Lasting Changes
Celebrating your accomplishments, renewing your motivation to
remain active, and troubleshooting challenges to maintaining
your healthy activity
Appendix A: Stages on the Way to Becoming Active
Appendix B: 2020 Par-Q+
Appendix C: Energy Expenditure Chart
Appendix D: Forms for Progressing Toward an Active Lifestyle
Bibliography
Index
About the Authors
You’ve Come to the Right Place!
By opening this book, you’ve taken the first important step toward
becoming physically active. To make any change for the better, you have to
want to change. The fact that you’re here means you’ve taken that first step.
This program is designed to help you succeed.
There are plenty of good reasons to add physical activity to your life.
Something as simple as a half hour of brisk walking every day can make a
big difference in your health and how you feel about your life. Pushing
yourself a little harder can increase the benefits. Here are some results you
can expect:
More energy
Brighter mental outlook
Reduced risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, stroke, and
diabetes
Reduced risk of colon and breast cancer
Less chance of colds and flu
Healthier bones, joints, and muscles
Lower risk of falling
Better weight control
Reduced risk of depression
Better sleep quality
Healthier and longer independent life
If a pill could offer so many benefits, we’d all want to take it, right? Yet
the majority of Americans still aren’t active enough for their own good.
According to the latest national statistics, less than 5 percent of adults
participate in 30 minutes of physical activity each day. Only one in three
adults receive the recommended amount of physical activity each week.
More than 80 percent of adolescents do not do enough aerobic physical
activity to meet the guidelines for youth (U.S. Department of Health and
Human Services 2019). Why? Because it’s easy to be inactive. Labor-
saving devices such as cars, elevators, riding mowers, and washing
machines have taken over tasks that used to demand physical effort.
What can we do? One option is to fit in a formal workout three to five
times a week. But not everyone likes to exercise. Many of us are busy with
work and family. We barely have enough time in the day to do what we
need to do, let alone what we know we should do.
Or so we think. In fact, there are simple, easy, and enjoyable ways to add
activity to your life. Walking instead of driving, climbing the stairs instead
of taking the elevator, dancing, and riding a bike all offer good ways to
incorporate activity into your lifestyle. Together, they add up to better
health, a fitter body, and a potentially longer life.
A Step-by-Step Plan That Works—
We Can Prove It
Most people don’t need to be convinced that they should become active.
They simply need to learn how to fit physical activity into their lives. That’s
why we’ve put together this step-by-step program that is based on
scientifically tested methods.
Beginning in the mid-1950s, exercise scientists focused almost
exclusively on the health and fitness benefits of vigorous and sustained
exercise. Then work by one of our coauthors, Dr. Steven Blair, and others
helped to spark a new way of thinking about physical activity. These studies
showed that men and women who were moderately fit had a substantially
lower risk for heart disease, stroke, and premature death than those who
were unfit and sedentary. The benefits of being moderately fit applied to
almost everyone: smokers and nonsmokers, people with high cholesterol or
high blood pressure, even those with a family history of early
cardiovascular disease. Surprisingly, even people with obesity who were
moderately fit had lower death rates than thin people who were unfit. What
mattered was the amount of exercise people did, not how intense the
activity was.
With those findings in mind, we designed a study, Project Active, to test
a lifestyle approach compared with a standard fitness-center approach to
increase and maintain physical activity. We recruited 235 men and women
who were currently doing little or no exercise. Half of them committed to
doing a standard gym workout three to five times a week. The others, part
of our lifestyle group, met in small groups to talk about ways to incorporate
physical activities such as walking and stair-climbing into their everyday
lives.
By almost every measure, men and women in the lifestyle group enjoyed
the same benefits as the people who worked out at the fitness center. After
two years, their average blood pressures dropped. They lost the same
amount of body fat. They were burning the same number of extra calories
from activity as the hard-core gym goers. They also gained the same
improvements in fitness. For years after our program ended, many
participants were still maintaining an active lifestyle. It seems that many
people find it easier to stick with activities that are part of their daily lives
rather than gym routines (Dunn et al. 1999).
Our findings showed that almost anyone who is sedentary and unfit can
benefit enormously from becoming just moderately fit through physical
activity. That’s great news. It means you can gain the benefits of physical
activity at the gym or on your own.
To make active living available to people everywhere, we transformed
the research materials from Project Active into the Active Living Every Day
(ALED) program. Over 45,000 copies of the book have been sold
worldwide. Most of the books have been used in ALED programs delivered
by nonprofit organizations, corporations, public health departments, health
care groups, and research institutions. Research studies using ALED have
shown that it
helps older adults increase their physical activity (Wilcox et al. 2008),
helps people with arthritis become more active (Callahan et al. 2007),
can be successfully implemented using an Internet format to increase
physical activity and reduce cardiovascular risk among overweight
adults (Carr et al. 2008),
encourages people who don’t think they like physical activity to feel
more positive about it and enjoy it more (Das and Petruzzello 2015),
helps people maintain their new, higher physical activity level for at
least six months (Wilcox et al. 2008) and as long as two years (Dunn
et al. 1999), and
has been used effectively in a variety of real-world settings (Dunn et
al. 2012).
For these reasons, our program can help almost anyone become more
active.
Making a Change for the Better
We’ve based this book on the latest psychological research about behavior
change and our experiences using the program. Thanks to feedback from
our volunteers, we were able to create a program based on what people
need, want, and enjoy. We saw what worked and what didn’t. From our
participants’ experiences, we’ve put together one of the first scientifically
tested programs for increasing lifestyle physical activity. Unlike many other
programs, ours
considers your readiness to change behavior,
emphasizes moderate-intensity activities,
helps you increase the intensity of your activities if you wish,
lets you create your own activity plan,
helps you solve problems and overcome obstacles,
concentrates on activities you can add to your daily routine, and
gives you tips for making other healthy changes in your life.
How to Use This Book
Before you get started, a few simple tips can help you get the most out of
this book.
1. Take One Step at a Time
It’s natural to want to rush in and make big changes all at once, especially
when you’ve made up your mind to become more active. However, plenty
of studies have shown that the best way for most of us to make lasting
changes is one step at a time, experimenting until we find what works for
us. That’s why we encourage you to follow the steps in each session.
2. Go at Your Own Pace
We designed this book for you to complete one session each week. You may
end up completing one session quickly and another more slowly. All we ask
is that you finish each session completely and fully apply the skills you are
learning. If you get bogged down and need a refresher, return to a previous
session. Our participants often found that they learned something new or
improved their understanding by reviewing material from earlier in the
program.
3. Track Your Progress
Throughout this book, we ask you to write down information. It’s important
to keep track of your progress so you’ll know where you started and what
you’ve achieved. When we wrote the first edition of this book, we
suggested that people buy a pocket-sized notebook to keep with them so
they didn’t have to lug the book around. That’s still good advice. But these
days many people use their smartphones to jot down notes and keep track of
their activities, and that works, too. Later in the book, we’ll talk about
fitness trackers that provide another way to track your progress.
4. Check Out Active Living Every Day Online
ALED Online (www.activeliving.info) offers supporting resources for each
session in the book. You’ll find more in-depth information on topics
addressed in the session, links to related websites, downloadable forms, and
resources that will supplement the information in the session on ALED
Online.
We are confident that this book will help you become active, fit, and
healthy as it has done for thousands of others. We look forward to helping
you become active every day.
Now let’s get started!
Acknowledgments
We want to begin by thanking the hundreds of men and women who
participated in the clinical trials of the Active Living Every Day program,
which showed that a lifestyle approach to increasing physical activity really
does work. We also thank our colleagues at The Cooper Institute and Brown
University for their dedication to the successful implementation of the
Project Active and PRIME research studies. These studies would not have
been possible without the financial support of research grants from the
National Institutes of Health.
The third edition of Active Living Every Day (ALED) is significantly
revised thanks to the nearly 20 years of experience that have ensued since
the program was launched. During that time, ALED users gave us feedback
on how the program works—or doesn’t—in the real world. We would like
to especially thank the many people who were involved in the Robert Wood
Johnson Foundation’s Active for Life program. We are grateful to members
of the Council on Aging of Southwestern Ohio, OASIS Institute, Greater
Detroit Area Health Council, FirstHealth of the Carolinas, Jewish Council
for the Aging of Greater Washington, the National Program Office at Texas
A&M Health Science Center’s School of Rural Public Health, and Dr. Sara
Wilcox and the evaluation team at the Arnold School of Public Health at the
University of South Carolina for their implementation and testing of a 12-
session version of the ALED program.
This third edition also benefits from the hundreds of scientific studies
that have been published in recent years. Important new findings have
resulted in updated physical activity guidelines that are reflected in this new
edition. We now have further evidence about how much physical activity is
needed for health, and studies have been conducted that have clarified the
dangers of too much sitting. What’s more, we know more about the benefits
of accumulated activity to key health outcomes. Over the past decade, the
technology of monitoring our physical activity has led to an abundance of
new tools that have undergone testing to determine their validity and
reliability, offering consumers choices that can aid them in setting goals,
monitoring their progress, and staying on track.
Finally, we would like to thank our colleagues at Human Kinetics, who
have shared our passion for helping people attain the many health benefits
that a physically active life can offer. Special appreciation goes to Michele
Guerra, who guided the initial development of the ALED program to be
something much more than this book. Also, the program would not have
been sustained over this past decade without Michelle Maloney’s
management expertise, and we are grateful for her dedication. Finally, we
thank Anne Hall and Hannah Werner, our developmental and managing
editors respectively for the third edition, for their guidance and support.
Steven N. Blair
Andrea L. Dunn
Bess H. Marcus
Ruth Ann Carpenter
Peter Jaret
Session One
Ready, Set, Go
In This Session
