Fighting the obesity epidemic 10 minutes at a time

An odd sight may catch your attention on most days if you're near the entrance to the School of Public Health or walking past a classroom in the Center for Health Sciences. You might even hear music and the sound of clomping shoes coming from a conference room where people are vigorously marching.

Marching?
Wherever and whenever she can, Dr. Antronette (Toni) Yancey yanks staff, faculty and students out of their daily routines to do just 10 minutes' worth of exercise.

No one is safe. Not in their classrooms or meetings, labs or offices. This professor of health services, board-certified physician in preventive medicine and former college basketball player/fashion model, can, as someone once put it, "talk a hungry dog off a meat wagon." Unsuspecting passersby just walking down the sidewalk can find themselves pulled into a pick-up group moving to the insistent beat of a boom box as they perform a routine of simple, low-impact movements she's developed called Lift Offs! and Instant Recess!

"People may say, 'Ten minutes of exercise? That's silly,'" Yancey said. "But if you can do another 10 minutes in the afternoon and then squeeze in 10 minutes after you get home from work, that's 30 minutes a day. That's all you need."

 

Yancey believes that persuasion isn't enough to get 80 percent of Americans to exercise regularly. In fact, human nature is conditioned to avoid unnecessary physical activity, she maintains. "Humans are hard-wired not only to prefer salty, fatty foods, but sedentary behavior," she said. Because our ancestors had to expend a lot of energy as farmers or hunters to survive, our bodies are predisposed to conserving energy as much as possible.

Now that our survival doesn’t depend on being physically active, two-thirds of all U.S. adults are overweight. While most people acknowledge the importance of physical activity, Yancey said, only 20 percent have actually made it part of their lives. A study she and her colleagues did in 2004 showed that more than 40 percent of Los Angeles County adults were getting less than 10 minutes per week of continuous moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.

"The current paradigm for promoting physical activity – trying to engage people in it during their leisure time – isn't working," said Yancey, founding co-director of the Center to Eliminate Health Disparities. She has spent her career helping the poor and minority populations get healthier through her work with schools, corporations, nonprofit and sports organizations and government health agencies.

"BUILDING IN" EXERCISE

 

Yancey is researching the outcomes of one strategy that forces people to be physically active through the built environment. "In order to get people to value physical activity, you have to make them do it," she said. 

One example where physical activity is "built" into the workplace is a Sprint plant in Kansas City where parking facilities for employees are at least a 10-minute walk away from the plant.

In California, at the new Caltrans District 7 Headquarters, an award-winning building designed by Thom Mayne, a UCLA professor of architecture and urban design, the main elevator only stops at the 1st, 4th, 7th, 10th and 11th floors of the 13-floor building — requiring people to walk up or down the stairs to get to other floors. While two other elevators serve all floors, one is reserved for the disabled while the other is located a long walk away on the other side of the building.

"It does encourage people to get more exercise," said Judy Gish, a Caltrans spokesperson.

However, Yancey, who is tracking who climbs up the stairs and who doesn't, said those more likely to take the stairs up are usually more fit, white, young and male.

Other firms have taken a more direct approach and simply made exercise mandatory. At an L.L. Bean plant in Maine, workers are required to participate in five-minute breaks of stretching and aerobics three times daily. And the results have benefited the company. "They've demonstrated that they can get 30 minutes of productivity from 15 minutes of exercise," Yancey said. Workers said they felt more focused, and there were fewer work-related injuries.

Yancey is on her own mission is to change the socio-cultural environment to induce people to exercise by taking Lift Offs! and Instant Recess! out to the community. And she's recruited a research team to make that happen — including students, psychologists, statisticians, exercise scientists, business marketing and communications experts, and a graphic designer/creative director. For example, two of Yancey's students with graduate degrees in kinesiology, Jammie Hopkins and Mona Auyoung, choreographed different ethnic dance and sports movements for the routines.

 

She's also enlisted the help of professional athletes, including the NFL's Allen Rossum and the San Diego Padres baseball team, along with financial support from the California Department of Public Health and the California Endowment, to produce CDs and DVDs of these 10-minute routines. During Family Days at the ballpark, in pre-game activities and breaks during games, fans are sometimes coaxed to their feet by athletes who lead the exercises. Yancey is currently talking to the Los Angeles Sparks about creating a similar initiative.

She has also persuaded nonprofit groups and human resource departments to adopt healthy practices at 25 work sites throughout Los Angeles, with a concentration in South and East L.A. where large numbers of minorities live and work. Her team recently received an award of $2 million from the National Institutes of Health to evaluate this approach in 60 new Los Angeles sites.

 

Yancey's staff goes into these workplaces to train a small cadre of people to become program champions. Companies commit to providing more nutritious fare at meetings or in lunchrooms and to requiring employees to take up to two 10-minute fitness breaks a day.

Too tough? Not if you want to put people on the road to healthy living.

"We have to make physical activity difficult to avoid — with consequences if people opt out — so that their default choice is to be active," Yancey said.

 

See pro football's Rossum in action doing Yancey's Instant Recess!

 

To read more about Lift Offs! and see photos of children and adults doing them, go to this website.