It’s abundantly clear that if you want to reduce your risk of developing cancer exercise is important.
Additionally, if you are a cancer survivor exercise has been shown in numerous studies to significantly lower your risk of cancer recurrences and death.
I have written extensively about this is prior articles (start with this one).
Without a doubt, exercise is one of the most important things you can do as a cancer survivor to anticancerize your body, making it less conducive to cancer growth and recurrence.
I have coached my patients for a number of years to set an exercise goal of trying to get at least 30-minutes of moderate intensity exercise (i.e. brisk-paced walking) per day. This is based on high quality data showing that this is all that is needed to begin to see large reductions in cancer recurrences and deaths.
Exercise Duration & Intensity Matter:
A new study indicates that if you want to see even better results longer duration and higher intensity exercise matters. Breast cancer survivors who did about 1 mile per day of brisk-paced walking reduced their risk of dying from breast cancer by 24%. If they stepped it up a notch and ran for 2/3 of a mile each day they reduced their risk by 40%…and the superstars who ran 2.3 miles per day dropped their risk of recurrence by a whopping 95%!
Dr. Lawenda’s Bottom Line:
What this tells us is that if you are healthy enough to exercise longer and with more intensity you might be able to massively change your biological terrain so that any hiding cancer cells have much less ability to survive.
We know that the physiologic anticancer effects of exercise are active against many different cancer types (i.e. breast, prostate, colon, ovarian, etc.), so the findings reported in this study likely apply to millions of cancer survivors.
All this being said, too much exercise (intensity or duration) can stress out the body, impair immune function and increase inflammation. This is another one of those examples of how too much of a ‘good’ thing can become detrimental to your health. So be smart and don’t overdo it.
Read more about starting an exercise regimen in our 4-part series here.
Exercise is just one component of the integrative oncology program. To truly optimize your cancer outcomes there’s much more you’ll need to do.
Get started today. See an integrative oncologist in your area or do the IOE PREMIUM PROGRAM
