GUEST CONTRIBUTION: Matthew ‘Tepi’ Mclaughlin, @HealthTepi, PhD Candidate @Uni_Newcastle Chair ISPAH Early Career Network

 

‘It’s a lockdown, but don’t stop exercising’ is the message from the UK Government during the Coronavirus pandemic of 2020.

On the back of this stance, a few people have been quick to suggest this may increase the nation’s physical activity. Or it could go the other way.

I suggest it will decrease during lockdown.

Personal Case Study of the Mclaughlin Family

Our family unit currently consists of myself and my parents, whilst I am home from Australia (where I am doing my PhD and live with my fiancée).

Dad works at a busy café, regularly sending me screenshots of how he’s done 10,000 steps whilst at work. The café is closed due to the Government directive.

Mum’s a gym bunny, her classes have closed at the gym.

I cycle 26km a day commuting to work, I now walk from my bedroom to the office.

Last week, we set up home gym in the back garden. We’re lucky, we could afford the equipment. We have the skills to set up a safe exercise circuit. We’re all motivated. We don’t have children to look after. We have a back garden. The weather has so far been kind.

We’ve been out each day since.

So yes, it may appear we’re ‘exercising’ more….but I suggest we’re doing less overall physical activity during this pandemic. Between us, we’re doing less active transport and less occupation-related physical activity.

Some reasons why we won’t be more active during this pandemic

Reason 1: We might exercise more during our leisure, but we’ll do less active transport and work related physical activity.

• The majority of our physical activity doesn’t normally come from exercise during our leisure time
• Less people need to get to work, which likely means less active transport
• Less people are working, both in manual labour and offices, therefore less occupational physical activity

Reason 2: Gyms are closed, so exercise routines are disrupted.

• Do people have the skills to be active outside a gym? I.e. they don’t have the ‘physical literacy’ to be active at home
• YouTube videos may partially replace a gym, but they likely won’t achieve the same intensity of or duration of physical activity as a gym visit
• Some may think this is an opportune time for a ‘break’ from exercise

 Reason 3: The privileged might, but others won’t exercise more.

• Some may have a ‘spare room’ or a garden to exercise in, many won’t.
• Some may have access to equipment, many won’t.
• Some may not normally have to work, so may already have been physically active at home (e.g. home gym)

 Reason 4: Many of us have been instructed to leave the house under no circumstances, not even for exercise

• “Extremely vulnerable” people are instructed not to leave the house, and that list is long

**NEWS FLASH**

Data from Fitbit suggests a decline in step count last week of 9% in the UK compared with the same time last year. It looks as though I was right, unfortunately.

Post the Coronavirus pandemic, will physical inactivity be recognised as a pandemic?

Possibly.

In the long term, this may have some unanticipated benefits. The ‘stage’ that physical activity has been given by politicians is bigger than ever, just by being mentioned. The negative emotions people feel from this lockdown may last, people may attribute them to “not getting outside” or “not moving about”. I suggest Dr Karen Milton may be right:

 

Today was the first day of the British “lockdown”. Seeing the devastation wrought upon countries such as China, Italy and Spain, the UK government has finally(!) taken more serious steps to overcome the Coronavirus. Their official advice is below.

While the advice / rules are generally clear, there is still some confusion – for example, what counts or what does not count as essential. More detailed advice about leaving the house was provided in a document on the government’s website:

In reply to a journalist’s question about how much running, cycling or walking people should do each day, one government minister replied that they should do what “ordinarily would have done”. So if this advice is followed, there won’t be an upsurge in the nation’s physical activity levels, since many/most in the population don’t ordinarily meet government guidelines for physical activity anyway.

After more than a week of very limited movement outside of home, I decided to go for a walk after lunch to a local park. Here’s my thoughts on that. Rewatching the video I noticed I said the UK government still “encourage” exercise … but in hindsight, that was probably too strong … “allow” exercise is probably closer to the truth!

Part 1: Avoiding Other People

Part 2: At the Park

Part 3: The End of the Walk

I am not sure what the future holds for these sorts of excursions. It looks like the situation in the UK `is only getting worse with more than 80 people dying today from the virus. It is quite possible even walking, running and cycling for exercise will need to be eliminated for a while. Keep safe everyone!
Joe P

I was honoured to discuss some analysis on a proposal for a more inclusive, expansive definition of physical activity during a webcast:

 

Why is so much attention given to physical activity? Why do we care about it? Why is it in policy?

To answer this, in my book, I argue that we should think of physical activity as a specific political discourse.  Discourses are forms of knowledge, so they govern the way a topic can be meaningfully talked about or reasoned about, and they influence how policy ideas are put into practice. So instead of thinking about physical activity simply as human movement, from a policy perspective it is much more than that. Here is a brief explanation of my thinking …

The physical activity discourse, I argue, has not emerged out of nothing. Other discourses, like ingredients, have facilitated the escalation in physical activity’s rise to prominence and legitimacy. For example, consider the obesity epidemic which has framed human bodies as susceptible to specific judgement and surveillance (see Gard and Wright, 2005). The rise of surveillance technologies which affect both leisure and work has allowed physical activity to be measured ad infinitum (and ad nauseum).

Of course, the discourse does not necessarily appear with all these ingredients. It needs a raft of committed “bakers” who will devote time and attention to escalate and seek legitimacy for the physical activity problem. Networks are needed, most obviously manifesting as scientific associations of physical activity. And along with these scholarly societies come links to industry and the state.

And after scientific elements establish legitimacy, the physical activity discourse is continually built upon and deployed in different spheres, with frontiers in all directions. Indeed, this framework for thinking about the physical activity discourse is not intended to be static. There will be specific contexts which frame physical activity in unique ways. That is part of what makes the discourse a potentially powerful policy driver. Its hybridity and its potential omnipresence as a matter of concern (affecting all domains of human life) means that it can be potentially infused into all sorts of policies.

The model below shows how a range of “forms of knowledge” work together (and / or separately) to produce what we know about physical activity (particularly in many Western, developed societies).

While I suggest biomechanics is an essential discourse, it does not carry a great amount of disciplinary weight when physical activity is researched, analysed or justified. Human movement without values added is not enough to produce and sustain the physical activity discourse. More influential is the biomedical discourse, which has made connections between physical activity, health, and death rates. (There’s more in the book on this!). Various sustaining discourses shown above allow for physical activity to be deployed at different times in texts, policies and programmes by a wide array of different organisations. You can see “health”  is only one of many discourses that sustains current concern about it. Many other discourses contribute now too.

This discourse has real implications. Correlating insufficient physical inactivity with all manner of economic, health, environmental, and inter-personal outcomes leads to a number of flow on effects, including the production of new experts, new expectations, authoritative organisations and specific ideas about social order.

I argue that by seeing viewing physical activity in this way – as a discourse made up of the interplay of other discourses (and not simply as a means to promote public health) – we might better appreciate how the swirling and growing mass of concern about physical activity affects us all.

The Politics of Physical Activity REFERENCES

Joe Piggin

A new study on “Worldwide trends in insufficient physical activity” has been published in a journal. It continues to confirm what many of us understand already, high income countries tend to have high rates of physical inactivity. Low income countries tend to have low rates of inactivity.

This BBC article pointed out that two of the most active countries are Uganda and Mozambique. Another BBC article explored the Uganda situation in a bit more detail. It asked “So what is Uganda getting right? … People in rural Uganda, where most of the population lives, are very active on their farms, says the BBC’s Patience Atuhaire. But, she says, in urban areas people are becoming more sedentary, especially as they get wealthier.” Evocative imagery accompanies the news item:

All of this leads me to ask three awkward, but necessary questions:

1. Why have I never seen these countries used as positive templates for physical activity?
2. Might it be something to do with current life expectancy in these countries? Uganda’s average life span is about 59 years. Mozambique’s current average is close to 55 years. [To contrast, Monaco is about 89.5 years, Japan is about 85 years, and Sweden is about 82.5 years].
3. So, to increase life expectancy, would it be reasonable to encourage highly urbanized living, even if it means decreasing population PA rates in these areas?

 

Joe Piggin

PS: The political nature of this issue (how people should be organised in society and what they should do), does remind me  of something I wrote 11 years ago, available here. I critiqued the strange New Zealand policy of aiming to be “the most active country in the world”. Of course not only did New Zealand never have a chance at the title, but also the goal itself is morally problematic. The implicit rationale of trying to be more active than another country is that you want another country to be less active, and therefore, less “healthy” than your own. This, I argue in academic parlance, is crazy.

Warnings about risk are moral endeavors. Agendas which aim to minimize risk involve (usually implicit) ideas about human safety, welfare and security. But when people perceive the risk-minimization agenda is being taken too far, such as attempting to minimize risk in school settings, the reaction often contain claims of “nanny state” and “cotton wool”. But a recent Australian news report shows that everything we think about raising “tough”, “resilient” children might be a sham. I recommend reading the link above and then reading the rest of this critique … at your own risk.

The fascinating thing about this article is that despite the “pro-risk narrative” in the title, this narrative is subtly subverted through various disclaimers and imagery. The end result is that far from being a place where children “stare down risk”, the schools presented in the article are places where risk is continuously managed through numerous physical structures and rules. Here are some Socratic questions:

1. What is the point of the article?
   The article title is: “The anti-cottonwool schools where kids stare down risk in favour of nature play.” Look at the rhetoric here. Schools are positioned as resisting cotton wool and the children are actively staring down risk. Big claims for sure, but they are not necessarily borne out by the evidence.
2. What activities are now promoted by the schools?
   The article suggests children can now “… race around on rollerblades, fly off ramps in crates and slide down trees.” This sounds fine, but it leads to another question …
3. Are there any rules at all?
   Yes, actually, there are still plenty of rules:
   Helmets are compulsory
   Signed permission is essential
   Wheeled activities appear to be on a one way track
   Trampolines are fully enclosed with side netting
   No more than 2 children can be on the trampoline at any time
   No stacking milk crates
   No walking on the large wooden spools
   No tying rope to yourself
   Sun hats and shoes appear compulsory
4. What does the play look like?
   The imagery in the article shows that far from being “free” play, the activities remain regulated with regard to risk reduction. For example, a claim that “Students at West Greenwood Primary School get knocked down, but they get up again” is accompanied by a image of someone falling off a sled onto apparently soft grass. The wheeled activities require helmets and are one way travel.
   
   Neither the trampolining nor the “ramp” appear to be particularly places of great risk. If indeed activities such as these have been banned before then I would agree with one of the teachers in the article that things have gone too far if indeed these activities were removed.
   
5. What is the result of all this supposed risky play?
   Well, the claim that injury complaints have reduced at one school should really provoke some thoughts. Is it that these children are being injured to the same extent but not complaining? Or impossibly, are they being injured less often despite riskier play? If it is the latter, one might argue this new play is still not risky enough! We don’t learn this from the article but it would be nice to know!

   Joe Piggin