Forgot to buy an Advent Calendar? Don’t worry… Scientists have created a Christmas-themed exercise calendar to combat holiday overindulgence.
Christmas-themed physical activity during Advent may increase activity and reduce sedentary time in inactive adults, a pilot study in The BMJ suggests.
Physical activity can help prevent diseases such as heart disease and diabetes, yet activity levels remain low in many countries.
The Christmas holidays pose a high risk for physical inactivity and weight gain, with some evidence showing people gain 0.4-0.9 kg during this time. It is uncertain how feasible a holiday-based activity intervention would be.
Therefore, researchers at Loughborough University conducted a pilot study to assess the feasibility and efficacy of a Christmas-themed physical activity intervention aiming to increase physical activity levels and decrease sedentary time during Advent.
Between 11 and 30 November 2021, they recruited 107 inactive people (who did not satisfy UK physical activity recommendations) through social media sites, workplaces, and community organizations. The majority (88%) were white women with an average age of 46 years and 56% were obese or overweight.
Participants were randomly allocated to either the intervention group (71) or control group after gathering baseline data (36).
Participants in the intervention got an email every day during Advent (1–24 December 2021) with a Christmas-themed idea for a physical activity to do that day.
Exercise examples included “Star” jumps, “Dasher the reindeer” sprints, “10 lords-a-leaping” rope skips, “Lay the table” planks, and “Rocking around the Christmas tree” song dances.
There were three levels of difficulty for each idea: Easy Elf (low difficulty), Moderate Mrs. Claus (moderate difficulty), and Strenuous Santa (high intensity). Each day, the participants were allowed to choose the degree of physical activity they would engage in.
On December 1, participants in the control group were given a pamphlet on healthy living.
All participants completed an online questionnaire to describe how many minutes per week they spent performing moderate-to-vigorous intensity physical activity and how many days per week they did muscle-strengthening activities.
Approximately fifty percent of participants in each group were instructed to wear an accelerometer (a device that measures the volume and intensity of physical activity) on their wrists 24 hours a day for the duration of the research.
Participants in the intervention were also asked to rate how much they liked the ideas for activities and to remember which activities they did each day and how hard they were.
The researchers admit that this was a short intervention that didn’t lead to big changes in behavior, and because it was a pilot study, they couldn’t say how well it worked. But the intervention was safe, cheap, and easy to scale up, and there is evidence that it might be able to change people’s health behaviors in the long run.
One of the pilot study’s findings was that, on average, in weeks one and two, both groups reported engaging in equivalent amounts of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity.
In comparison to the control group, the intervention group had engaged in around 21 minutes more of weekly moderate-to-vigorous physical activity and slightly over half a day more of weekly muscle-strengthening activities at week three.
Accelerometer data revealed that across the intervention period, the intervention group engaged in comparable amounts of physical activity—15 minutes of moderate-to-vigorous intensity, 22 minutes of mild intensity, and 37 minutes of total physical activity—than the control group.
During the intervention, individuals in the intervention group also spent, on average, 59 minutes less time sitting down than those in the control group each day.
Overall, 42 (70%) of the 60 people in the intervention group said they liked it, and 41 (69%) of the 59 people in the control group said they did the Active Advent ideas every day. 18 (30%) of these people finished Easy Elf, 12 (21%) finished Moderate Mrs. Claus, and 11 (18%) finished Strenuous Santa.
Although this research wasn’t meant to assess safety, no issues were noted.
“The public were interested to engage in a Christmas themed physical activity intervention, which also reduced sedentary time and showed promise for increasing participation in physical activity,” the authors wrote.
“Enjoyment of, and adherence to the intervention shows that the public would welcome public health campaigns to help them become more physically active and less sedentary during the holiday season.”
Source: 10.1136/bmj-2022-072807
Image Credit: Alejandro Martinez Velez/Europa Press via Getty Images
