Keeping active to #Fightstroke
Every November, the Stroke Foundation runs the Stride4Stroke campaign to get the community active, fundraise, and raise awareness to #Fightstroke.
Physical activity and exercise are essential for human health, including helping to prevent stroke. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has recently updated their recommendations to encourage everyone to do 150–300 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic physical activity or 75–150 minutes of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity every week - plus muscle strength training.
That might seem like a lot of exercise, but maybe there are changes we can make to our environment and our routines to help nudge us in the right direction so we automatically end up doing more exercise. The built environment has a critical role in encouraging people to do incidental exercise, which is the exercise you do when you don’t know you’re doing exercise. The Australian Heart Foundation has found where we live is linked to our risk of heart disease, which is a sobering thought. Ensuring people can access everything they need within a 20 minute radius on foot, by bicycle, or by public transport is increasingly accepted as the gold standard in urban development, but for someone who has had stroke this may be a very different experience to someone who is training for a cycling championship.
Image source: Planning Victoria
The Heart Foundation has a handy tool to help people to find a walking group in their area - so you can keep active and connect with your local community.
As well as helping to prevent stroke and other cardiovascular diseases, the physical fittness that we get from activity and exercise is also hugely beneficial during stroke rehabilitation; helping your body and brain to recover faster and more effectively. But it can understandably be incredibly difficult for people who have had a stroke to be active while they are in hospital and we know that people in hospital spend most of their time in their bedrooms, inactive and alone.
Maybe there are key changes we can make to the hospital environment to help people to be physically active and build physical activity habits. More green outdoor spaces? Interesting places to go to outside your bedroom? Wider corridors? More handrails? More practice in being physically active beyond the protected environment of the rehabilitation unit? The NOVELL Redesign project is working to answer these questions and more. Get in contact with us if you have any innovative suggestions to promote activity in rehabilitation!
Early detection of stroke can save lives - remember to always think F.A.S.T.