Sport is becoming an increasingly rare guest in everyone’s daily programme, and the idea of sporting performance requires more effort and support than ever before.
Sedentary versus physical activity
We wake up every day with a programme full of household or professional tasks, often cascading late into the evening. We take the kids to school, go to work, pick up the kids from after school, do the shopping and continue at this pace for days on end, accumulating stress and a chronic amount of fatigue that brings us close to exhaustion. We know that physical activity, movement, helps us to break out of the noxious state that our daily routines plunge us into, but we find it difficult to change a seemingly overwhelming schedule.
Let’s start with definitions, because as an American army general once said: ‘errors in definitions lead to errors in strategies’.
Physical activity is any movement of the body produced by skeletal muscles that consumes energy. It includes activities that use one or more large muscle groups.
A list of forms of physical activity may include, but is not limited to: walking (preferably outdoors), cycling, climbing stairs rather than the lift, exercise for all muscle groups (in fitness rooms), resistance exercises that increase muscle strength of large muscle groups of the trunk and limbs, intense aerobic exercise that improves the cardiorespiratory system (reducing the risk of cardiovascular disease, stroke and hypertension), weight lifting for bone health, swimming.
Sedentary behaviour is any activity that involves sitting or lying down, with low energy consumption (less than 1.5 metabolic equivalents).
It is not surprising that the European Commission’s Eurobarometer shows that only 2% of Romanians are involved in voluntary sports activities and only 2% (another 2%) are members of a sports club.
The figures don’t look good and they reflect a society in which 3 out of 4 Romanians spend more than two hours sitting down and 51% of us do not engage in any kind of daily physical activity.
“What is missing is a real partnership between three areas that are essential for the health of the population: sport, health and education,” declared Adrian Socaciu, president of the Romanian Sports Institute, last year. According to the World Health Organisation, children and young people between the ages of 5 and 17 should accumulate at least 60 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity every day.
“Physical activity is still an undervalued value in the Romanian health ecosystem. The World Health Organisation recognises the benefits that movement brings both for the prevention of chronic diseases and for the management of diseases such as obesity and diabetes mellitus, cardiovascular diseases or some types of cancer.
In the reality of 2021, unfortunately, sport and health have intersected far too little, far too rarely and without continuity and a common vision for development,” also says Marius Geantă, MD, president of the Centre for Innovation in Medicine.
Practising sport
It was movement that saved us from our natural predators since ancient times, but with the development of society and the increase in personal security, it has lost its primary role.
In 2021, you will no longer have to beware of bears unless you want to visit Brasov and pass through the Răcădău neighbourhood, so movement, running, as a self-defence mechanism, has disappeared.
Movement has disappeared, but not our historical mental mechanism that eliminates stress through movement.
Balance is achieved through movement, and the elimination of stress and the regaining of energy is achieved through physical activity, by “tricking” the brain, which is under siege, but not under the siege of a predator, but under the action of modern everyday situations.
In today’s conception, leisure-time sports activity takes on two fundamental aspects: practical usefulness and the fight against fatigue.
The undeniable pleasure of physical exercise and outdoor movement for people.
If leisure time is used intelligently, it becomes a means of shaping the human personality, of development and lifelong learning. Outdoor activities can be organised with family, friends or colleagues, without turning into organised competitions, as is the case with walks, excursions, various games, swimming, etc., or they can take the form of competitions with clearly established rules. The essential thing is that these physical education and sport activities become part of each individual’s daily life regime.
The benefits of exercise can only be realised if sport does not remain an aspiration but turns into action! Studies show that 50% of those who start an exercise programme give up within 6 months.
Motivation is as much about the level of effort put in by an individual as it is about the energy expended to achieve a particular goal.
Performance
Physical activity carried out in an organised way, under the guidance of a professional, who may be an instructor or coach, is more likely to achieve health goals in complete safety.
There is a difference between sport and movement, because sport is different from movement.
Sport involves physical effort, sweating, and the correct performance of more complex movements that require attention, concentration and coordination.
Sport, unlike simple movement, is based on certain biomechanical principles which, if not respected, can lead to injury, pain or a deterioration in the body’s state of wellbeing and health.
Statistically, 5% of those who practise sport for personal development or to maintain a state of wellbeing choose to move into the performance area, a step which requires a paradigm shift.
Entering the field of sports performance brings with it a set of cognitive, physical and social gains, but it comes at a cost, time being by far the most important one.
The time allocated to training increases and in the short term physical overload occurs, leading to the need for recovery methods after exercise to regain the optimum level of energy, allowing training sessions to resume without interruption.
Diet and nutritional supplements must be designed to provide the energy resources necessary to support intense activity, such as sports.
Arginine is one of the substances needed in the recovery process and is included in the daily diet of high-performance athletes to obtain the best results with increased efficiency.
