Professor of Movement and Metabolism, Mike Trenell
"We’ve got the top qualified clinical physical activity and exercise team in the UK. "
Regular exercise can significantly improve health and well-being as we age
The biggest threat to our health and well-being is the chairs we sit on – we spend too much time sitting in them rather than taking exercise and enjoying more active lifestyles.
This is a point made by Professor of Movement and Metabolism at Newcastle University, Mike Trenell, who has been part of a team gathering hard evidence that regular exercise can significantly improve health and well-being as we age.
“Our bodies are not designed to sit behind a desk at a computer, they are designed to move,” he explained.
“The evidence we have shows very clearly that an active lifestyle influences your fitness, the way your muscles, your brain and your heart work.
“An active lifestyle is something we should take seriously, it should be a priority. But it should be something you enjoy, that you do regularly.”
Reducing healthcare costs
Professor Trenell produces a striking statistic: patients with type 2 diabetes can walk 45 minutes every day and get the same improvement in blood glucose control as from a major class of drugs, potentially reducing an individual’s healthcare costs by £800 a year.
Treating this diabetes costs the NHS £10.3billion a year – around 10% of the entire NHS budget – so it is not just a question of improving health and well-being, there is also an economic impact.
What he calls structured community exercise addresses three elements of ageing: muscle decline; poor metabolic control that leads to the accumulation of fat in tissues and hardened blood capillaries caused by excess sugar deposits; and brain shrinkage with its accompanying impact on functions such as cognition.
“If I exercise my leg muscles the blood flow increases in my arm muscles and in my brain. The knock on effect is that the nerves inside the brain grow. This is called neurogenesis, or brain growth,” he said.
“One of the state-of-the-art studies we have done is to look at community-based structured exercise programmes, designed specifically to do something inside the body: get the blood flowing. They also improve balance and physical performance.
“The reason we are interested in exercise, for example in the case of stroke survivors, is because we wanted to reduce the chances of them getting a second stroke.”
MoveLab
Mike, who comes originally from Manchester, worked in Australia for the International Olympic Committee. He did his doctorate in neurogenetics and endocrinology before coming to Newcastle, where he is now a clinical physiologist and National Institute of Health Research Senior Research Fellow.
He was drawn to Newcastle because of exciting topics being addressed by multi-disciplinary groups. “Whether you are a physicist, a biologist, a physiologist, or whatever, people work together to try to find answers to complex questions of health and well-being.
“There are very few places in the world that do that – and do it effectively. Newcastle is one of those.”
An instance of this is MoveLab, of which Professor Trenell is director. This is funded by the Medical Research Council, the National Institute for Health Research, industrial partners, Diabetes UK and the NHS.
“We’ve got the top qualified clinical physical activity and exercise team in the UK. We work together to tackle a simple problem: how to move more and sit less.
“We are challenging the way we think about that, because we all know that movement is good for us. The question is how to span the behaviour gap,” said Professor Trenell.
“The way you do that is by putting individuals in an environment where they can make informed choices, and also giving them to tools to do it.”
That, in a nutshell, is structured exercise. And along the way Professor Trenell and his colleagues are tackling some misconceptions about exercise.
“A common one is that exercise will help you to lose weight. Not on its own. Exercise and physical activity are wonderful for preventing weight gain. But if you want to lose weight you eat less and move more. It's a simple equation.”
Contact Mike Trenell about his research.
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