Grant: Travel Awards - Institute Community Support

Eight-five percent of Canadian adults do not meet the recommended amount of weekly physical activity at an intensity to achieve health benefits. Individuals also do not have the supports they require in primary health care to adopt more physical activity into their daily lives. Primary health care workers often say that they do not have enough time to talk with their patients about adopting a more physically active lifestyle and also report that they do not know enough about physical activity counseling. Therefore, we have designed a 4 month physical activity counseling program within primary health care to provide individuals with the supports they need to be more physically active by adding an exercise specialist (i.e. kinesiologist) into primary care. Based on our findings so far, individuals are accumulating almost +10 minutes of physical activity at an intensity to achieve health benefits in bouts of 10 minutes or longer after completing the program. Even larger physical activity improvements (i.e. +100 minutes per week) were observed when physical activity was assessed in 30 second bouts or longer. This improvement suggests that our program was helping individuals re-schedule their lives in which they were able to be physically active for about 1 hour and 40 minutes a week more than they were before receiving our physical activity program. This type if physical activity counseling program is one potential strategy to help support individuals to become more physically active.