This post is about an interesting study done by Harvard on hotel workers in 2007.
Think for a minute about hotel workers, toiling day-in and day-out cleaning hotel rooms. Walking around, bending over, squatting, carrying cleaning supplies and generally working hard all day long, five days a week. Should this count as exercise? Certainly they are physically active, but does this manual labor confer the same benefits as going to a gym every day?
The answer is stranger than you think.
Researchers used room attendants from 7 hotels, and split them into two conditions: under one condition about half of the room attendants were informed that their daily work not only met, but exceeded the surgeon general's recommendation of 30 minutes of moderate exercise per day; under the control condition they were told nothing.
At the conclusion of a four week period, only the informed group made significant improvements in body weight, BMI, body-fat percentage, waist-to-hip ratio, and blood pressure. The uninformed group remained the same on all of these measures. But both groups did the same amount of physical activity, and over the same period of time, so what's going on here?
The room attendants did not report changing their diet or exercise habits over the course of the study. It appears that mind-set matters. If you think what you're doing is healthy for you, maybe it really is.
The real point of this blog-post is to get you thinking. What type of physical activity do you get daily outside of the gym? Climbing stairs, walking to work, cleaning your house, all of these things burn calories and can be counted towards your physical activity goals!
Further, knowing that things like walking to work or climbing stairs can make a difference (especially if you remain cognizant of it) you can work on increasing this type of activity - take the longer walk to work, take the stairs, or do some extra cleaning.
Crum, A. J., & Langer, E. J. (2007). Mind-set matters exercise and the placebo effect. Psychological Science, 18(2), 165-171.
Think for a minute about hotel workers, toiling day-in and day-out cleaning hotel rooms. Walking around, bending over, squatting, carrying cleaning supplies and generally working hard all day long, five days a week. Should this count as exercise? Certainly they are physically active, but does this manual labor confer the same benefits as going to a gym every day?
The answer is stranger than you think.
Researchers used room attendants from 7 hotels, and split them into two conditions: under one condition about half of the room attendants were informed that their daily work not only met, but exceeded the surgeon general's recommendation of 30 minutes of moderate exercise per day; under the control condition they were told nothing.
At the conclusion of a four week period, only the informed group made significant improvements in body weight, BMI, body-fat percentage, waist-to-hip ratio, and blood pressure. The uninformed group remained the same on all of these measures. But both groups did the same amount of physical activity, and over the same period of time, so what's going on here?
The room attendants did not report changing their diet or exercise habits over the course of the study. It appears that mind-set matters. If you think what you're doing is healthy for you, maybe it really is.
The real point of this blog-post is to get you thinking. What type of physical activity do you get daily outside of the gym? Climbing stairs, walking to work, cleaning your house, all of these things burn calories and can be counted towards your physical activity goals!
Further, knowing that things like walking to work or climbing stairs can make a difference (especially if you remain cognizant of it) you can work on increasing this type of activity - take the longer walk to work, take the stairs, or do some extra cleaning.
Crum, A. J., & Langer, E. J. (2007). Mind-set matters exercise and the placebo effect. Psychological Science, 18(2), 165-171.
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