By National Obesity Observatory ( September 2012)
These SEFs aim to describe and explain the information that should be collected in any evaluation of an intervention that aims to increase participation in physical activity. It is aimed at interventions that work at individual or group level, not at population level.
By Department of Transport (August 2012)
This is a new statistical release which presents information on walking and cycling amongst adults (aged 16 and over) in England, by local area. The statistics in this release are based on results from the Active People Survey (APS), an annual household telephone survey administered by Sport England. The APS is designed to measure recreation but includes questions about all cycling and walking activity. The APS covers more than 160,000 persons, which is sufficient to enable detailed analysis at local authority level.
By The King’ s Fund (August 2012)
People’s lifestyles – whether they smoke, how much they drink, what they eat, whether they take regular exercise – affect their health and mortality. It is well known that each of these lifestyle risk factors is unequally distributed in the population. Less is known about how these behaviours co-occur or cluster in the population and about how these patterns of multiple lifestyle risk have been evolving over time. This paper considers this in the context of the English population and sets out the implications for public health policy and practice that flow from the findings. It reviews the current evidence on multiple lifestyle risks and analyses data from the Health Survey for England on the distribution of these risks in the adult population and how this is changing over time.
By The Rand Corporation (2012)
Walking for Health is a physical activity intervention with the primary purpose of making a positive difference to people’s physical health. This report presents research into the economic costs of delivering the Walking for Health programme. These include financial (or accounting) costs and opportunity costs, which are the values of the foregone costs that could have been dedicated some other objective, based on a small sample of schemes representative of the variety across the programme as a whole.
By The Cochrane Library (2012)
People with asthma may show less tolerance to exercise due to worsening asthma symptoms during exercise or other reasons such as deconditioning, as a consequence of inactivity. Some may also restrict activities as per medical advice or family influence and this might result in reduced physical fitness. Physical training programs aim to improve physical fitness, neuromuscular coordination and self confidence. Subjectively, many people with asthma report that they are symptomatically better when fit, but results from trials have varied and have been difficult to compare because of different designs and training protocols. Also, as exercise can induce asthma, the safety of exercise programmes need to be considered