The Effect of Daily Physical Exercises for Improvement of Risk Factors of Cardiovascular Diseases in the Middle-aged and the Old-aged in a Community

The purpose of this study was to determine whether moderate habitual physical exercise brings about the improvements of physical fitness, blood pressure and serum lipids in the training men. 481 volunteers in Iwafune town were asked to participate in the training program for six months from October 1990 to March 1991. They underwent a medical examination to check risk of heart attack before and just after the physical exercises. Optimum levels of walking exercise based on their own physical fitness were loaded on them once every day for six months. Amount of daily physical activities were measured for all the subjects of volunteers by using portable pedometers. The results were as follows: 1) The number of steps per day was over 7, 000 steps in 24.4% of the subjects, whereas lower than 3, 000 steps per day in 18.3% of them. A tendency of less daily steps was observed in the groups of 30s' years old . 2) After six months of health program practice, slight improvement of physical fitness were observed in both sexes, especially the required time of a fast walking was significantly shortened (p<0.01). 84.5% of the subjects showed pronounced improvements in endurance performance . 3) Remakable decreases of blood pressure were observed in the groups of hypertension and borderline hypertension before the program. Especially, the walking groups over 5, 000 steps per day brought about desiable improvement of blood pressure . 4) Habitual practice of daily physical activities led to significant increases of HDL and apo A-1, and significant decrease of TG and AI of both sexes. 5) No significant improvement was found in left ventricular function between pretraining and post-training. 6) Acording to the six months of health program practice, the improvement of daily physical or life style was obtained many volunteers, furthermore, a tendency of disappearance in unidentified clinical syndrome was observed. These findings suggested that regular physical activities for six months improve their physical fitness, blood pressure and serum lipids in the middle-aged and the old-aged, and daily physical exercises are very useful for prevention of cardiovascular diseases in a community health activity.