Exercise advent calendar can help people be more active during holidays

By Gwyn Wright via SWNS

An exercise advent calendar helps get people off the sofa and shed a few pounds before Christmas, a new study has found.

Participants enjoyed the activities, which included “abdominal snowman” sit ups and a “Christmas deliveries” walk, which suggests people would welcome public health campaigns to keep them fit during the holiday season.

Physical activity is an important way of stopping diseases such as diabetes and heart disease, yet activity levels remain low in many countries.

The Christmas holidays are a particularly risky period for weight gain.

Evidence suggests people put on between 0.4kg and 0.9kg of weight during the festive season, but it had been unclear whether holiday-based physical activity could stop this.

Researchers at Loughborough University decided to test whether a plan of Christmas-themed exercises during Advent would be feasible and effective.

Exercises included included “Star” jumps, “Dasher the reindeer” sprints, “10 lords-a-leaping” rope skips, “Lay the table” planks and “Rocking around the Christmas tree” Christmas song dances.

Each exercise was offered at three intensity levels; Easy Elf (low intensity), Moderate Mrs. Claus (moderate intensity), and Strenuous Santa (high intensity).

Participants were free to choose the intensity level each day.

In the first two weeks, both groups did around the same amount of daily exercise but in the third week the intervention group reported doing 21 more minutes of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity per day.

They also reported doing just over half a day more of muscle strengthening exercises per week.

Accelerometer data showed that the intervention group did more minutes per day of moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity (15 minutes), light intensity physical activity (22 minutes), and total physical activity (37 minutes), than the control group during the study period.

On average, people in the intervention group also spent almost an hour (59 minutes) less time sitting down per day than people in the control group.

Overall, 70 per cent of participants in the intervention group said they liked the intervention and 69 percent of them reported that they completed the Active Advent intervention ideas each day.

Of these, 30 percent completed Easy Elf, 21 percent did Moderate Mrs. Claus, and 18 percent completed Strenuous Santa.

For the study, the team recruited 107 adult Brits who do not do the recommended amount of exercise.

They were recruited from social media, workplaces and community groups in November last year.

Most of them (88 percent) were white women and they had an average age of 46, and 56 percent of them were either overweight or obese.

Participants were randomly assigned to the intervention group of 71 people or the control group of 36 people.

They were emailed a Christmas-themed activity idea every day between December 1 and Christmas Eve last year.

The control group were simply given a leaflet about healthy living on December 1.

All participants filled in an online questionnaire to report how many minutes they spent doing moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity per week and how many days they performed muscle-strengthening exercises per week.

Around half of participants in both groups were asked to wear an accelerometer (a gadget that tracks the volume and intensity of physical activity) on their wrist 24 hours a day for the duration of the study.

People who did the exercises were also asked to rate how much they enjoyed them and recount which activity at which intensity they did each day.

Study author Dr. Gregory Biddle said: “The public were interested to engage in a Christmas themed physical activity intervention, which also reduced sedentary time and showed promise for increasing participation in physical activity.

“Enjoyment of, and adherence to the intervention shows that the public would welcome public health campaigns to help them become more physically active and less sedentary during the holiday season.”

The findings were published in the Christmas issue of the BMJ.