Facts to Know

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1. Studies find that walking at a brisk pace for three or more hours a week or exercising vigorously for 1.5 hours a week can reduce your risk of coronary heart disease 30 to 40 percent.

2. Thirty-nine percent of women age 18 and over get insufficient physical activity, 14 percent are never active at all, and more than 53 percent of women don't meet the recommended amounts of exercise per day.

3. Less than half of adults engage in regular, leisure-time physical activity (light-to-moderate activity at least five times per week for at least 30 minutes each time, or vigorous activity at least three times per week for at least 20 minutes each time).

4. No matter how poor your current fitness level, you can start an exercise routine and become fitter and healthier. Even 90-year-old women who use walkers have been shown to benefit from light weight training.

5. Simply adding movement to your daily routine can increase your level of fitness. For example, if you park in the last row of the parking lot and walk briskly five minutes each way between your office and your car, walk up and down the stairs at your office during your 10-minute afternoon coffee break and walk the dog for 10 minutes when you get home, you've already racked up 30 minutes of exercise.

6. Women with heart disease or arthritis actually experience improved daily function from involvement in various modes of physical activity.

7. Fitness consists of five components: your body's ability to use oxygen as a source of energy, which translates into cardiovascular fitness; muscular strength; endurance; flexibility; and body composition.

8. To address all the components of fitness, an exercise program needs to include aerobic exercise, which is continuous repetitive movement of large muscle groups that raises your heart rate; weight lifting or strength training; and flexibility exercises or stretching.

9. Walking at a brisk pace (a 15-minute mile or 4 mph) burns almost as many calories as jogging the same distance, and both walking and jogging benefit the bones. The advantage of jogging is that it takes less time to cover the same distance; however, it may be too strenuous for some.

10. It takes about 12 weeks after starting an exercise program to see measurable changes in your body. Before 12 weeks, you will notice an increase in your strength and endurance.

11. To reduce the risk of chronic disease, the departments of Health and Human Services and Agriculture and other professional groups recommend that healthy women do some sort of aerobic exercise on most or all days of the week for 30 minutes. To manage body weight and prevent weight gain, women should exercise moderately to vigorously for 60 minutes most days of the week, and to sustain weight loss, the recommendations are for 60 to 90 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise most days of the week.

12. Strength training should take about 20 to 30 minutes for each session, and you should stretch at least 30 minutes, but even five minutes of stretching after exercise is better than none.