CHRISTOPHER BERGER, 42, an exercise physiologist and professor at the University of Indianapolis, has an uncommon view of airports and business travel.
Where some see frustration, anxiety and long lines, Dr. Berger sees opportunities to move and relieve stress. Where some see an interminable wait, he sees an invigorating walk.
“What I try to promote with my interest in air travel is the simple fact that flying can be healthy,” Dr. Berger said. “Travel does not mean deconditioning. You’re stuck in a terminal for three hours, boo hoo, but you have a climate-controlled place where you can walk literally for miles at some airports if you want.”
As chairman of an American College of Sports Medicine task force on healthy air travel, Dr. Berger enthusiastically delivers his Exercise on the Fly public health pitch to colleagues, airport managers, travel industry officials and anyone else who will listen.
He urges airport managers to develop signs and promotional materials to encourage walking. He talks about the surprising number of airports that are adjacent to public parks and pedestrian paths, easily reachable during layovers. He points out that terminals themselves are big enough to create your own indoor walking path.
In other words, Dr. Berger is saying, instead of exercising patience with flight delays, security agents and airlines, just exercise.
“The human body is not meant to sit in these airline seats for a long time,” he said.
There is a risk, for example, of deep vein thrombosis — clotting when blood becomes stagnant, typically in a leg from sitting still for long periods of time. “Instead of sitting for five hours, walk, even just 15 or 20 minutes,” said Dr. Carl Lavie, a cardiologist at the Ochsner Heart and Vascular Institute in New Orleans. (On long flights the risk is greater, Dr. Lavie said, so he recommends getting up in the plane’s cabin and stretching or walking every hour or so, if possible.)
At airports, Dr. Berger practices what he preaches, to an extent that perhaps only the most committed frequent flier would venture.
In March, while on a long layover in Phoenix during a trip from Indianapolis to Los Angeles, he put together his own airport marathon. Arriving in Phoenix, he bounded off the plane, got on the PHX Sky Train and took it to the Metro Light Rail connection. He caught a train to Tempe, where he disembarked and walked to Arizona State University’s aquatic center.
There, he enjoyed an hourlong swim, did a bit of sunbathing, showered, dried off his swim trunks with a hair dryer in the locker room (he had worn his swimsuit under his business clothes), dressed and headed back to the airport, in plenty of time to go through security again for his connecting flight.
Dr. Berger acknowledges that such involved schemes are not for every traveler. There are much simpler exercise options for business travelers, such as checking your bags, changing into a pair of comfortable shoes in your carry-on and going for a brisk 20- or 30-minute walk around the airport terminal.
Dr. Berger spends a lot of time in terminals, some of it by choice. Growing up in Canton, Ohio, he was a high school track athlete with one career goal. “The only thing I wanted to do was be a pilot,” he said. He went to Arizona State, majoring in aeronautics, but was told he could not meet the eyesight criteria for a pilot.
“In one minute my whole future changed,” he said. “I was still interested in flying, but I had also developed this interest in physiology and exercise science.” He went on to earn a doctorate in exercise science from the University of Kentucky, taught at George Washington University and is now finishing his first academic year at Indianapolis.
A few years ago, he heard about an idea that Carl Foster, then president of the American College of Sports Medicine, was contemplating. “I began to think that if you want to get people moving, which is one of our public policy goals at A.C.S.M., why not airports?” said Dr. Foster, a professor of exercise science at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. “Why just sit there and eat airport food? Walk around.”
Dr. Foster talked up the idea of a public health initiative to promote airports as places for physical activity. When Dr. Berger, the frustrated pilot-turned-physiologist heard about it, “I practically begged him to be on the committee.”
Five years later, the results of their efforts are mixed. As a casual glance around any passenger lounge will attest, most travelers still seem set in their stationary ways.
Dr. Berger and his three task-force colleagues see signs of hope, however. They are in the process of finishing a survey of all physical activity opportunities at the 20 or so major hub airports in the United States, including nearby walking paths, golf courses, airport gyms, and yoga and meditation rooms. They hope to publish the material and eventually make it available to all interested travelers on the task force’s Web site.
The results of the survey convince Dr. Berger that “if there’s a trend, the trend is in favor of health and fitness.”
Other public health organizations are turning their focus to physical activity and the flying public, with some initial success. Janet Fulton, an epidemiologist with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, is working with Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport on a research project to determine what kind of signs or messages will encourage passengers to walk from concourse to concourse instead of taking the Plane Train people mover that connects them.
Airport officials estimate that only 10 percent of the roughly 240,000 people who pass through the airport each day choose to walk, Dr. Fulton said, adding, “If we can get another 10 percent to choose walking versus riding the train through our campaign, we’ll have a huge impact.” She said that airport and airline officials had been receptive to the idea.
Dr. Berger said other airports had started walking programs for employees and passengers, some in collaboration with the American Heart Association or other groups.
Yet, whether most travelers will actually step off the escalators, eschew the shuttle trains and rise out of their seats in the passenger lounge, signs or no signs, is unclear. Persuading them to leave the terminal and visit nearby recreational paths — like the 18-mile Mount Vernon Trail, a stretch of which is adjacent to Ronald Reagan National Airport in Washington — is less likely.
Dr. Foster of the University of Wisconsin said his own walking while traveling was limited to the inside of the airport. But there are advantages to that, similar to those of mall walking.
“It’s a safe venue, you’re going there purposively, it’s climate-controlled,” Dr. Foster said. “Why not get some exercise while you’re there?”
Research has shown that even short bouts of physical activity can have significant health benefits. Indeed, that is the basis of the federal government’s physical activity guidelines for adults, which urge Americans to accumulate 150 minutes of moderate activity a week. And whatever you do is better than sitting.
“Some activity is better than none,” said Steven N. Blair, a professor in the Arnold School of Public Health at the University of South Carolina, who recommends incorporating activity into an airport layover. “When you get off the plane, go for a walk. Use those muscles; you’ll feel better and there is research suggesting that it might even make you more productive in your work.”
Dr. Berger, not surprisingly, is convinced that more business travelers will eventually follow in his footsteps.
“I get the sense that more people want to do this,” he said, as he packed his bags (walking shoes and workout clothes included, of course) for yet another trip. “But they don’t know how, or don’t even know that they can.”
Source: The New York Times
April 30, 2013
By John Hanc, photo by David Maxwell for The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/01/business/a-physiologist-suggests-exercise-during-airport-layovers.html?emc=tnt&tntemail1=y&_r=1&
