If you hate formal exercise, no sweat. Go take a walk. Doing everyday physical activities like walking for 30 minutes most days of the week is as effective in the long run for lowering body fat, improving blood pressure and boosting aerobic fitness as doing more traditional structured exercise three to five days a week, according to two studies in today's Journal of the American Medical Association.

If you want to beat the blues of depression best put on your exercise shoes. That is according to the latest news. In fact, researchers have found that regular exercise might be more effective than medication in the treatment of serious depression. They suggest that three brisk half hour sessions per week is effective in both treating and preventing the symptoms of depression. The report from the Duke University in North Carolina also found that extra activity was effective in preventing any future relapses. These groundbreaking findings suggest patients will actually cope far better with depression when actually they feel much in more control of the therapy they receive. Somewhat astonishingly a group of patients who combined drugs with exercise showed results that were not as good as for those who took exercise alone.
Head of the Duke research team, the psychologist Dr James Blumenthal commented on the results,

"We had assumed that exercise and medication together would have an additive effect, but this turned out not to be the case. We found there was an inverse relationship between exercise and the risk of relapsing - the more one exercised, the less likely one would see their depressive symptoms return."

Older people who want to lift their spirits and get more quality sleep might consider joining the local gym. Regular resistance training significantly reduced depression and improved sleep in mildly to moderately depressed people in their 60's, 70's and 80's.

Half of the 32 volunteers exercised leg, hip and upper torso muscles on pneumatic resistance equipment for 45 minutes three times each week. The other 16--the control group--attended a group health education meeting. Resistance on the exercise equipment was set at 80 percent of the maximum load each volunteer could complete in a single repetition on that day.

At the end the 10-week study, 14 of the 16 exercisers no longer met criteria for depression. Their depression scores improved two to three times above the control group, the researchers reported in the Journal of Gerontology (vol. 52A (1): M27-35). Quality of sleep improved in more than one-third of the exercisers compared to none of the control group, they reported in Sleep (vol. 20 (2): 051-055).


Elders are at high risk for depression. Researchers with ARS and Harvard Medical School wanted an alternative or an adjunct to anti-depressants because they can cause side effects, interact adversely with other medications and increase the risk for falls or delirium. Moreover, they don't counteract frailty or improve mobility and function.


Progressive resistance training, on the other hand, improved the volunteers' strength, vitality, morale and ability to maintain social activities compared to the control group. It also reduced physical pain and emotional stress that would otherwise interfere with normal activities. This is the first controlled study to show that exercise is an effective antidote for depression and poor sleep in older men and women. And it's the first study to show that resistance training can improve sleep in any age group.