Of all the factors involved in a person’s state of health, it is difficult to know to what extent one intervenes in isolation. Apart from quantifying it, there is enough evidence that shows us physical activity as a vehicle for health and disease prevention.

Normally, when we talk about health we cannot dissociate many factors from each other, that is why the defence of healthy living is the main objective to follow in health promotion, in our case in particular, the duo physical activity + food is inseparable, and we cannot understand a proper prescription of one of them without the other.

Guidelines for starting physical activity in overweight children

Change of chip: We cannot maintain an inadequate scheme of life to which we add half an hour of exercise and point. Deciding to start in sport to combat obesity must include not only an increase in physical activity, but also a reduction in sedentary life, we must evaluate and consider the time we spend with less active activities, such as computers, television and video games. As we saw in the entry “Every minute counts” even the small time periods dedicated to doing more physical activity influence this total counted time.

Physical activity as a routine: We must include it as one more task of the day we do for health, just as we brush our teeth and shower, we know that they are necessary for our health, sport must be understood in a similar way. Let’s inculcate physical activity in the day-to-day, not as something sporadic of the weekend that is completely inconsistent with our possibilities.

Adaptation of the exercise: It is crucial to mark the objectives and to study the possibilities of the child, we cannot take quick decisions because we are overwhelmed, let’s study the preferences, the recommendations for his situation, let’s explain to him the benefits of the physical activity for his age.
This includes not only discipline, it also takes into account the sessions, their intensity and duration, for the type of pathology it is better to do long training and moderate intensity.

Of course physical activity should be a source of motivation for the young person, if he does not choose sport, does not cause satisfaction or does not see evolution can be discouraged to lose adherence.

Combine with food: The prescription of the exercise has to be combined with the one of an adequate feeding, it is not enough to reorder its habits of activity, the decision to take a healthy life affects several parcels and if we intervene in all of them at the same time the results will be better.

Weight matters, but fat more.

Nowadays, sport as a treatment and prevention of diseases, especially those related to sedentary life, is based on the increase of the person’s energy expenditure. The data usually indicate that sport achieves a reduction in the amount of body fat, without directly influencing the weight as such. Although this a priori may seem insufficient is more than positive, since the parameter that interests to reduce for the state of health is the fat mass, which is related to cardiovascular diseases that we want to avoid.

When doing physical activity we increase our muscle synthesis, so not only do we “burn” our reserves, but we create new tissue that tomorrow will consume more energy. That is why we should not understand weight as the only parameter in nutritional monitoring, being much more appropriate to assess the body composition with the multiple possibilities that exist.

Guidelines for physical activity education

Exercise carried out independently and in isolation is not synonymous with obtaining adequate health and prevention-treatment of obesity. Therefore, it is not worth any exercise, any intervention and in any way, the exercise must be adapted to the situation and the person, and therefore does not produce the preventive effects if it is not associated with a nutritional treatment that goes hand in hand with it.

However, we must bear in mind that sport is a vehicle for the establishment of active life routines in children, which is why we need to educate children in a healthy sporting habit.

In order to combat obesity it is necessary to intervene from different areas, as there can be no contradictions school-home, home-coach-sports, even here we could include the messages of the media that has treated this blog so much in these other entries.