S E8: Ep 8 – A NEAT way to exercise less and still burn calories and get healthier

Hello and welcome to the Pain Free Living Podcast. My name's Bob Allen and my aim is to help you to live pain free. Let's begin.

I am a change consultant and coach. So I work with people and businesses to navigate change.

Our role is to help you to understand if you're in pain, why you're in pain, and if you're not in pain, how to prevent it.

Today we are talking about non exercise activity thermogenesis, which I have to say, given that I'm here to ask the questions I didn't know anything about before you introduced me to this term.

Okay, so non exercise activity thermogenesis, or neat, because it's a lot less of a mouthful, is all about the benefits of not exercising and fits in nicely.

With your mantra, which you often say around movement is medicine.

Movement is medicine. So where do you want to begin with this one, Louise? Where should we start?

How about the. What is non exercise activity thermogenesis?

Oh, I thought everybody knew what that was. As it says on the tin, it's about burning calories without actually exercising.

So exercise is classed as deliberate movement to increase blood pressure, etc. Etc.

The benefits of exercise are well known in that they can help reduce blood pressure, it can help to increase lifespan through more activity and just generally being healthier.

What it never takes into account is the fact that unless you're a professional athlete or a high level athlete, you're actually only going to be exercising. Most people will exercise once or twice a week. You know, they may be going to the gym. Some people are runners, so they may go out more often.

But what they don't take into account is the amount of time they spend where they're not deliberately being active.

So I only came across this term a couple of months ago and I did a little bit of digging and it's quite interesting that you can derive as much benefit from not deliberately exercising as you can from officially exercising. So, yeah, it's a really interesting concept.

Mm.

And so I guess then, in terms of you in with your osteopathy hat on, what benefits are there of NEAT for individuals as in terms of when you see somebody? Is this something that you're talking with them about, given that you've only discovered it a few months ago?

Oh, it's not something I talk about, but it's a principle that I apply okay. Because. No, people really don't care what non. Yeah, exactly. Non. Exercise, activity, thermogenesis. They don't care what it's called as long as the.

As long as I can bring that into my practice and what I do.

So as I was saying, you've got, you know, the World Health Organization recommends that you do 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous activity every week, plus two strength sessions, etc. Etc. A lot of people are going to find that way too demanding.

If you're in your 60s, you haven't exercised ever and you want to be more active, it can take a while to build up to that 150 minutes of moderate exercise. So what everyone can do is they can be more active. Now, that sums up exactly what NEAT is. It's.

It's increasing activity without necessarily exercising, for want of a better word and what it refers to. It's basically everything that's not deliberate exercise.

So getting up and going to the kitchen to make yourself a cup of tea,walking up the stairs, getting up to change the TV channel. Not many people do that these days. That's why we have a remote control.

Blimey, Bob.

But it's. Yeah, I know I've shown my age now, but actually it's everything that doesn't involve deliberate exercise.

We can all do more of that and it's easy to do. So, you know, for me it's about increasing activity because like I said, one of my mantras is movement is medicine.

So the more we move, the better our health becomes.

So I would use NEAT where I have clients who aren't used to exercising, but I know that moving more will help to increase the rate that they recover at. So that's what I do.

There was an interesting bit of research that I found while I was doing some research on this, and it said that, you know, if you've got, if you've got a job where you spend a lot of time sat down, you work at a computer or something like that. A lot of us do. If you changed what you did for.

From spending all your time sitting to spending that amount of time standing, you actually burn a significant. It's not a massive number of extra calories, but taken over a year.

And this is the average person in the average job working in the average office, they don't exist.

But just to give you an idea, if you go change from sitting to standing and spend more time standing, you can burn the equivalent calories of what you would if you went for 60, 30 minute runs averaging around 5 miles per hour, that's the significant number of calories you would burn over a year. And that is an awful lot. And I know that I would rather spend a lot of time standing than I would do going out for 60, 30 minute runs.

Okay, I think the numbers are a little bit dubious, but the fact is you can burn a significant number of calories just by moving more. And if you think about it, how many, how many people do you see that are overweight?

There are fidgets, just move around, you know, the more you move, the more calories you burn.

And it's not just the fact that you're burning more calories, but it also means that you are effectively moving more without actually having to do this thing we call exercise.

You also talk about the perception that fitness and exercise is very much linked to the fitness industry. This perception of you've got to go to the gym and you've got to train really hard and six pack, all that kind of stuff.

But actually, particularly for people that might have limited mobility, whatever, or are in sedentary roles, jobs, there's things that we can be doing in our own homes without feeling that actually, you know, we might not even have associated it as exercise.

Yeah, exactly, exactly that. I mean, the fitness industry is geared up towards six pack buns of stale, massive biceps, all of those kinds of things.

And actually if that's what you want, then I have no issue with that at all.

But the majority of the population don't want to look like, they want to be a bit fitter, they want to be a bit healthier, but they don't really know why because there doesn't seem to be any balance. You're either. All the promotional stuff for the fitness industry is all about the body beautiful, but actually most people don't want that.

Most people will never achieve it. So if they are drawn in by that sort of promotion, then they're setting themselves up to fail.

I mean, how many people do you know that have taken out a gym membership, survived, gone regularly, particularly New Year's, that's always a good time for the fitness industry. New Year's Day, go to the gym, they don't get trained, they don't get given a program, they don't really know what to do in a gym.

So eventually it falls by the wayside and they just stop. Now, if we can get the message across that you don't have to do that, you can go for a walk around the house to start with. Make that a habit.

Be consistent.

When you can walk around the house and go up and down the stairs without getting out of breath, then you can take that a little bit further and a little bit further just by being more active. It can make a difference to your health. You're never going to run a marathon, but then how many people do that?

Yeah.

You know, so being more active will benefit your health in lots of ways.

So are there is neat generally safe for everyone? Are there any considerations?

To be honest, if you just go by. If you just go by a video you've seen on YouTube, I wouldn't. I wouldn't recommend that.

But if you talk to someone like myself or you talk to a physical therapist who has an understanding of how the body moves and how it works, then, yeah, it's safe for everyone. I worked in an old people's home and I ran an exercise class there. And the oldest person in the class was 99.

I worked with a lady who was pretty much bedbound, but there are still things that she could do because she could move. You know, she was paralyzed down one side. But you can still exercise and you can still move and.

Yeah, no, I haven't met anyone yet that I couldn't get to exercise, put it that way.

Great. Well, I guess the takeaway for that is that everyone can be more active.

Yep.

There's always a room to be more active. And going back to your mantra, movement is medicine.

Yep, that sums it up pretty well.

Cool. Thank you, Bob, for taking us through that one.

That's okay. No problem at all.

So if you found that interesting and you want to find out a bit more about neat, got any questions, then please get in touch by the usual socials and yeah, I'll do my best to answer those questions. Okay, we've come to the end of the episode.

Hope you enjoyed it, hope you learned a few things and please tell all your friends like and subscribe and I'll see you next time.