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Exercise

 

Brief summary

St Paul's Youth Forum supports local communities to exercise in many ways, for instance through its On Bikes project, its collaboration with the local gym Diamond Cut Training and its activities for children and young people.

The local areas we work in face many public health challenges, for instance through their comparatively high rates of heart disease and lower life expectancy.

 

In Scotland, health is often directly linked to levels of deprivation. Those in more deprived areas much more likely to die earlier and experience worse health compared to those in less deprived areas. 
 
Exercise has been shown to be able to benefit peoples' health in many ways.
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Local Context​​​​​​​​​​

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  • North East Glasgow, North Glasgow and Blackhill/Provanmill have consistently ranked among the top 20% most deprived areas in Scotland. This includes poor scores on the health domain rank (Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, 2016, 2016, 2020).

  • For instance, alcohol-related hospital admissions, rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), coronary heart disease and life expectancy are worse in Blackhill and Barmulloch East compared to the Scottish average (Public Health Scotland, 2022).

  • North East Glasgow also scores lower than the Scottish average on the indicators listed above and others, i.e. cancer registrations, asthma patient hospitalisations, and deaths aged 15-44 years (Public Health Scotland, 2022).

  • In North East Glasgow, only 11% of S1-4 pupils meet the recommended physical exercise target of 60 minutes of moderate physical activity 7 days per week (Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, 2022).

  • Similarly, only 62.9% of adults meet the physical activity guidelines of at least 150 minutes of moderately intensive physical activity per week (Glasgow City Health and Social Care Partnership, 2022).

  • These problematic health indicators have negatively affected residents for a long time. This is exemplified, the area's high rates of people limited by a disability, comparatively lower rate of people in ‘good’ or ‘very good’ health, and higher rates of deaths from cancer and cerebrovascular disease identified previously (Scottish Public Health Observatory, 2010; Understanding Glasgow, 2011a, 2011b).

  • Critically, the rather difficult public health conditions described above occur in a wider negative health context.

  • For instance, high levels of illness and mortality occurring across social classes have been noted in Glasgow (Mc Cartney et al., 2011).

  • Scotland has been dubbed ‘the sick man of Europe’ due to the higher mortality of its population, compared to other Western European nations (Mc Cartney et al., 2011; McCartney et al., 2012).

  • Scotland has the lowest life expectancy at birth of any Western European country and is shorter than across the UK as a whole; 2.3 years shorter for males and 1.8 years shorter for females (Scottish Government, 2023).

  • Deprivation is a key factor in health. Scotland has the widest socio-economic inequalities in health of any country in Western Europe (Popham and Boyle, 2011).

  • In Scotland, the gap in life expectancy between the most deprived and least deprived deciles is estimated to be 13.5 years for males and 10.2 years for females (Scottish Government, 2022).

  • In Scotland, life expectancy was estimated to be 25.8 years lower for those living in the most deprived areas compared to those living in the least deprived areas in 2019-2021.

  • Critically, life expectancy and healthy life expectancies have recently fallen in Scotland (National Records of Scotland, 2023; Walsh and McCartney, 2023).

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Why we focus on exercise

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  • The facts outlined above highlight the urgency to increase the number and availability of interventions supporting the health of local populations.

  • Generally, the evidence of the benefits of lifelong exercise has been described as ‘overwhelming’, with the potential to delay the onset of 40 chronic conditions/diseases (Ruegsegger and Booth, 2018).

  • High-quality reviews systematically summarising scientific evidence from several decades and countries have demonstrated that exercise has the potential to improve the outcomes for several health risks, including negative symptoms of mental state (Girdler, Confino and Woesner, 2019), i.e. depression (Cooney et al., 2013); coronary-heart disease (Dibben et al., 2021); and health risks in those who are overweight (Shaw et al., 2006).

 

 

INtervention Highlights

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Football

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  • Football has been described as a ‘medicine’ that is cheap and easily distributed (Krustrup et al., 2018).

  • For instance, a meta-analysis (a study of studies) showed that football improves aerobic fitness, cardiovascular function, and can reduce adiposity (Oja et al., 2015).

  • Other studies show that recreational football is an effective health promoting activity for untrained men (Krustrup et al., 2018), increases levels of VO2 max (Milanović et al., 2015), improves myocardial function in women (Krustrup et al., 2018), and has positive effects on systolic blood pressure (Milanović et al., 2015), among other health benefits.

 

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Cycling

  • Sustained uptake of cycling can have a positive impact on public health by lowering risks of mortality from any cause, incidences of cardiovascular disease and type 2 diabetes and improving mental health and well-being (Logan et al., 2023).

  • For instance, cycling has been shown to have clear health benefits such as improved cardiorespiratory fitness in youth and a reduction in all-cause mortality, cancer mortality and cancer morbidity among middle-aged to elderly people (Oja et al., 2011; Kelly et al., 2014).

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References

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