How Personalized Exercise Prescription Yields High Returns for Athletes, Non-athletes, and First-time Exercisers Alike

It goes without saying that exercise is a powerful tool for health. Exercise levels directly impact health outcomes and longevity, and health professionals typically provide lifestyle counsel that “some exercise is better than none” or a recommendation to walk 30 minutes 3 days a week.

Exercise impacts not only the obvious cardiovascular health metrics but also immunity, fall risk from aging, cancer outcomes, and the microbiome to name just a few. General recommendations or others provided by the Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans are well-grounded and evidence-based. But when it comes to yielding the highest health outcomes or greatest quality of life, personalized exercise prescriptions are the way to go whether working with current athletes, former athletes, casual exercisers, or non-exercisers.

There are many factors to consider starting with an assessment of an individual’s maximal oxygen consumption known as VO2 max. Simply defined as maximal fitness level, VO2 max is a foundation to generate appropriate exercise intensity, duration, modality, and frequency and get the best training gains. And who wouldn’t want that? Someone who is new to exercise might be at risk of doing too much too soon incurring an injury or sore muscles and setting them back on their exercise goals. Someone else may wonder why they aren’t getting stronger or losing pounds toward a weight goal despite their 30-minute walk 3 days a week. A validated noninvasive measure of VO2 to personalize exercise prescriptions is a first step.

Personalization needs to go another step factoring in age, time available to exercise, desired types of exercise, individual goals, and underlying medical conditions. Someone with osteopenia or osteoporosis who is also short on time will yield cardiovascular gains with 30 minutes of stationary cycling, but this modality of exercise will do little to offset progressive bone loss. By tailoring exercise to meet both health outcomes, higher returns for the same or lesser time and effort can be achieved.

Likewise, an individual recovering from a course of cancer treatment needs a customized exercise prescription that might include leg and other resistance training to mitigate chemo-related muscle atrophy. Someone with known coronary disease or a recent coronary event needs a plan with gradual progression and attention to symptoms. Those with diabetes or prediabetes need guided experimentation around the timing of exercise to tap down blood glucose levels. The examples are endless.

As an aging athlete, I’ve found I need to continually refine my own exercise regimens to yield the greatest returns on my investment of time. I need to use multiple modalities of exercise to offset the risk of overuse injury, and targeted modalities that recognize changes in muscle and bone composition, and I need to train balance and agility in ways that came naturally a decade or two earlier.

General activity guidelines and recommendations are a foundation for every person, but personalized exercise prescriptions get the highest returns on health outcomes and quality of life.  

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