You can count cancer prevention among the many benefits of cardio exercise. A new research study publishing in the British Journal of Sports Medicine has shown that regular cardio exercise is linked to the reduction of risk from nine types of cancer. Those include head and neck, stomach, colon, rectum, esophagus, kidney, lung and liver.
Researchers found that elevated fitness levels correlated to as much as a 40 percent reduction in risk of those cancers.
Maintain Cardio Fitness
As promising as the results are, it’s important to note what constitutes “cardio fitness”. Also called aerobic exercise, this involves using large muscle groups in a repetitive exercise. Weight training is not cardio training, but 45 minutes on a treadmill is.
- Duration. A key component to out cardio fit you are, is the length of time you spend doing aerobic exercise. The national recommendation is currently 150 minutes of brisk exercise (you’ll be breathing harder than normal) or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise (you can’t hold a conversation) over the course of a week. The more spread out the sessions are, the better. For instance, doing 30 minutes every day, is going to be more effective for health and cancer prevention than exercising 2 hours on one day and being sedentary the rest of the week.
- Types. Cardio exercising is some of the easiest to integrate into everyday life because these types of activities usually require no or minimal equipment. The most accessible and easy is brisk walking. You can also jog, or run if you feel up that and enjoy the exercise. Other forms include biking, hiking in the wilderness, and tending a large, diverse garden that requires daily upkeep.
Even though we continue to see breakthroughs in cancer treatments and drugs, the wisest and least expensive way to deal with cancer is to prevent it from ever occurring in the first place. It’s clear from this study that regular aerobic exercise as an important part to play in that goal.
