Being physically active and limiting your sedentary behaviour every day is essential to develop and maintain your overall physical and mental wellbeing.
The benefits of regular physical activity include:
- creating opportunities for meeting new people and socialising
- enhancing overall quality of life
- helping build and maintain healthy bones, muscles and joints to reduce the risk of injury
- helping prevent or manage mental health problems
- reducing the risk of many preventable diseases, including type 2 diabetes, heart disease and some cancers.
The Physical Activity and Sedentary Behaviour Guidelines[7] produced by the Australian Department of Health recommends the following advice for adults.
- Be active most days every week—every day is preferable.
- Accumulate 150 to 300 minutes of moderate intensity physical activity or 75 to 150 minutes of vigorous intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both moderate and vigorous activities, each week.
- Do muscle strengthening activities on at least 2 days each week.
The full guidelines also recommend minimising and breaking up long periods of sedentary behaviour, such as sitting. Fortunately, the surf lifesaving environment provides the perfect background for those wanting to adopt a healthy lifestyle.