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Removing playground benches may help parents be more active

Getting adults to be more active on visits to children’s playgrounds could be as simple as removing the temptation to sit, a small new study suggests.

Inspired during his daily lunchtime walks by the sight of parents sitting on playground benches, a U.S. researcher has shown that moving the seating away from the area increased the amount of exercise that parents and caregivers got as they watched their kids.

“For such an easy and inexpensive change, we were able to shift many adults from sitting to standing and that alone promotes health,” said lead author James Roemmich, a supervisory research physiologist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture in Grand Forks, North Dakota.

The study, published in the journal Preventive Medicine, focused on a single playground in Grand Forks, where parents tended to congregate at eight picnic tables with benches and watch their children. The researchers observed playground activity by adults and children for a week with the benches present, and for another week after they were taken away, then again for a week when the benches were returned.

When the benches were removed, the adults were as much as 23 times more likely to engage in moderate to vigorous activity, the researchers found.

With benches gone, the parents were “walking around following their child, watching them play, swinging or pushing children on swings, walking around and socializing with other parents, walking through the splash pad to cool off, playing with the kids/lifting kids up to monkey bars and other play equipment,” Roemmich told Reuters Health in an email. “A couple times they brought a Frisbee or football and threw them around with the kids.”

Removing the benches did not affect the amount of time adults were willing to let the children stay and play at the park, the researchers point out in their report.

They also found that removing the benches did not make the children more active.

“That’s because children are already very active when they’re at the playground, running from swings to slides, climbing and jumping,” Roemmich said. “Increasing their activity level is more challenging.”

The one thing that did tend to increase children’s activity level, Roemmich said, was if they arrived at the park with a friend or sibling. That “social facilitation,” he said, upped kids’ activity level because much active play typically requires partners.

Research also suggests that children play more if their parents aren’t hovering too close, Roemmich notes. “I’m not advocating leaving kids at the playground unsupervised, just give them some space,” he said.

The 17-acre park where the study was conducted is across the street from Roemmich’s office, so he passed by it daily.

“I saw a terrific playground there, and I noticed that the parents or adult caregivers were sitting while kids were playing,” he said. “I thought, ‘Wow, what a terrific opportunity for parents not to be sitting.'”

Roemmich said the study is an example of a “micro-environmental” change – a small alteration that can sometimes change behavior. Other micro-environmental changes include painting portions of the playground in bright colors and adding playground equipment – both of which have been shown to increase activity levels in children.

James Sallis, a professor of family and preventive medicine at the University of California, San Diego, said one of the virtues of this study is that “it could really be done in virtually any park or playground.”

Sallis, who was not connected with the study, is director of Active Living Research, an organization that supports research designed to promote physical activity in children and families.

“There’s a lot of applicability,” Sallis said, noting that removing benches is easy and inexpensive. “People are always looking for something you can do that’s cheap.”

“You could argue that it’s just a little bit of activity,” he said. “But that’s how we got to be an inactive society to begin with, with a million tiny little decisions like that. Who decided you needed benches in every playground?”

When asked if parents objected to the removal of the benches during the study, Roemmich said the parks department got “three or four complaint calls” from parents unhappy with the removal of the benches. “But once it was explained that it was a study, they were okay with it,” he said.

Sallis said he wishes the study had gone a step further and looked at whether removing the benches facilitated social activity among the adults.

“People tend to go to their own separate seat,” he said. “But if you’re standing up and wandering around, you may be more likely to have some social interaction – that could be an additional benefit,” he said.

Sallis also suggested that a next step to encourage adult activity might be to put adult exercise equipment on the periphery of the playgrounds.

Source: Fox news

Staying active all day linked to healthy aging

A generally active life, even without regular exercise sessions, was tied to better heart health and greater longevity in a study of older Swedes.

Based on nearly 3,900 men and women over age 60 in Stockholm, the study adds to evidence suggesting that just sitting around may be actively harmful, researchers say.

“We have known for 60 years that physical activity is important for the heart,” said lead author Elin Ekblom-Bak, of the Åstrand Laboratory of Work Physiology of the Swedish School of Sport and Health Sciences in Stockholm.

But until recently the research has mainly focused on exercise and has “forgotten” about the background activity that we do during daily life, she told Reuters Health.

Someone exercises vigorously or not, it still usually only takes up a small fraction of the day. That leaves the rest of the time for sitting still or engaging in non-exercise activities, like home repairs, lawn care and gardening, car maintenance, hunting or fishing.

For older people, who tend to exercise vigorously less than younger people, spending more time doing low-intensity activities like these could help cut down on sitting time, Ekblom-Bak and her colleagues write in the British Journal of Sports Medicine.

Between 1997 and 1999, more than 5,000 60-year-olds were invited to participate in the study, which began with a questionnaire about health history, lifestyle and daily activities, as well as medical tests and measurements.

At the study’s outset, people who were more active on a daily basis, regardless of their exercise levels, tended to have smaller waists and healthier cholesterol levels.

The participants were followed for the next 12.5 years. During that time nearly 500 people had a first-time heart attack or stroke, and nearly 400 people died from any cause.

People who had reported high levels of daily non-exercise activity were less likely to suffer a heart-related event and less likely to die than those who were the least active.

For every 100 people reporting low activity levels who had a heart attack or stroke, for example, only 73 highly active people experienced such events. For every 100 of the least active who died, only 70 of the most active did.

“These are fascinating findings,” said David Dunstan, of the Baker IDI Heart & Diabetes Institute in Melbourne, Australia, “but not really surprising since other studies that have looked at this from a different angle – that is, describing the detrimental relationship between excessive sitting and mortality outcomes – are essentially showing the same thing but in reverse because there is such a high correlation between sitting time and non-exercise physical activity behaviors.”

While sitting, muscles do not contract and blood flow decreases, which reduce the efficiency of many body processes, like absorbing glucose from the blood, said Dunstan, who studies heart health and exercise.

Non-exercise activity likely prevents the general slowing-down associated with sitting, he told Reuters Health.

“In addition to engaging in regular health enhancing exercise, people should be encouraged to also think what they do during the long periods in the day in which they are not exercising,” he said in an email.

“Engaging in regular exercise is still important,” Ekblom-Bak said. “We saw that those who exercised regularly and that also had a daily physically active life had the lowest risk profile of all.”

Moderate-to-vigorous exercise helps strengthen the heart muscle and other body muscles, and may help regulate blood pressure more than general activity, Dunstan said.

But it is important for doctors and society in general to promote daily activity, not just exercise, she said.

“Human beings are designed to move,” said Phillip B. Sparling, a professor of Applied Physiology and Health Behavior at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta who was not involved with the new study.

“Ideally, we should have a mix of all levels of activity,” he said. “But, regardless of whether one exercises or not, the new message is to move more and sit less throughout the day.”

Source: Reuters