Quickie #1

After my post about doctors and their lack of exercise knowledge, I decided to take a quick glance around the net and see if they (doctors) are doing anything to remedy the state of things. Were there any doctors speaking out? Are there courses for doctors on exercise?

I discovered a Continuing Education course through Harvard Medical School called “Prescribing Exercise”.  I signed up and finished the online “course” in 90 minutes… obviously not a very detailed education.

What I found was that doctors are being told to

• Talk about exercise at every patient meeting.

• Search for contraindications for exercise.

• If there are no contraindications, they should recommend light or moderate intensity exercise, based on a patient’s likes/dislikes, the number of health risks (heart conditions, family history, etc.) and a realistic progression of frequency and duration.

• Follow up with emails, postcards or phone calls to see how the exercise is coming along.

• Recommend heart-rate based exercise. Everything from gardening to swimming was mentioned… though weight-lifting was not. (Any of you who train with me know that your heart-rate can get plenty high and for an extended period of time during weight-lifting!)

• Focus on the physical and psychological benefits that come with regular exercise.

• Try to get healthy patients up to a minimum of 2.5 hours of low-to-moderate intensity exercise each week.

I didn’t find anything that jumped out as contradictory to what I know. It was based around safety first, with no mention whatsoever of movement patterns, periodization or “phases”, strength development, proper exercise form or corrective exercise.

Now I realize that this was just a simple CE course… but it was developed by a Harvard professor for Harvard Med students. So I’ll stick with my statements earlier that it seems that beyond the very basics of “exercise more, but don’t do anything that will hurt you,” doctors still have a long way to go.

The coolest part about it is that now, whenever I decide to quit training, go to Harvard Medical school, and graduate… I’ll already have one whole credit towards my Continuing Ed program! You can basically start calling me “Doc” right now!

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