College professor discusses exercise at wellness workshop
Robert Dunlevy took a road trip several years ago when a friend had a job interview in North Carolina. As he drove through the Winston-Salem area around 2 a.m., steam began pouring from the hood of his overheated car. When he pulled his car into a service station parking lot, Dunlevy noticed a large crowd of people chitchatting and smoking during what appeared to be a party.
Even though he felt a little uneasy when he saw the strangers standing in the parking lot, Dunlevy mustered up the courage to step out of his car. He walked into the service station and asked an employee for assistance. The employee pointed Dunlevy in the direction of a faucet, where he could get some water to cool down his overheated car.
Dunlevy, who is originally from a small town in West Virginia, felt apprehensive about walking past the crowd on his way to the faucet because he thought the North Carolina strangers would recognize him as a “hillbilly boy.”
He remembers feeling terrified that he would become the target of a robbery or another crime.
As he approached the very rough-looking crowd, one man started to move toward him. Dunlevy’s immediate response was extreme anxiety, stress and fear. He could feel his heart pounding and his hands sweating because he didn’t know what to expect. Adrenaline was rushing through his body. He was getting ready to defend himself or fight the strangers.
“It was a very stressful situation, because I thought either ‘I’m going to die or I’m going to have to take him out,'” he said. “It felt like my heart was going 100 mph. And then the guy comes up to me and asks, ‘Do you have some spare change?’ I was thinking that he was either going to rob me or attack me. You wouldn’t believe the sense of relief that came over me.”
When he realized that he wasn’t going to be attacked, Dunlevy immediately calmed down. His heart stopped racing. His hands were no longer clammy.
“I remember thinking that ‘there is a God in heaven, and I will testify every day to his glory,'” he said. “In essence, my body was filled with adrenaline because it was preparing itself for something. It’s a good thing that doesn’t happen to people every day because they wouldn’t be able to take it.”
During a recent Wellness and Healthy Lifestyles workshop for health-care providers, Dunlevy, who works as an exercise physiologist at The Wellness Center of Greene County Memorial Hospital in Waynesburg, told the personal story about how people respond to stressful situations.
A daylong series of workshops were featured during “Healthy Kids to Healthy Adults: Common Ground for Strong Communities 2002,” a local conference for improving health, held at the Uniontown Holiday Inn. Fayette, Greene and Washington Counties Covering Kids and Families Coalition sponsored the event.
Dunlevy, adjunct professor at Waynesburg College and owner and operator of Body Engineering L.C., a home-based personal training and post-rehabilitation company based in Morgantown, W.Va., said alleviating everyday stress in people’s lives will prevent chronic diseases.
In prehistoric time, Dunlevy said, stress was a positive response that prepared people to escape from an attacking lion or other dangerous situation.
“But we’re dealing with stress on a daily basis, and that’s not a positive thing,” he said. “We feel it at home when we get upset with our spouses and our children. We feel it when we’re working, and we face deadlines on our jobs and other difficult situations. Our body’s response to stress is a normal reaction.”
But if someone is really out of shape and doesn’t exercise, Dunlevy explained, stress can have a negative effect on that person and could even contribute or lead to a heart attack.
“If the heart isn’t conditioned, you can’t take the body’s response to stress,” he said. “Low-level persistent stress also isn’t good for people. Stress can affect the response to the brain, heart and circulatory system. These low-level constant pressures can gradually wear down the system.”
People might not feel the pounding of their hearts when they are confronted with low-level stress, but Dunlevy said it does increase the blood pressure level, which can also increase the risk of a stroke.
“Stress has also been shown to trigger heart arrhythmia,” he said. “During stress, the body also releases excess energy and fat into the blood stream. This causes the cholesterol level to rise.”
Dunlevy said stress also could lead to the onset of depression and anxiety in people, suppress the immune system and make people more susceptible to infection and diseases like irritable bowel syndrome.
“Some people eat more because of stress, and some people respond to stress by not eating at all,” he said. “If we’re having these responses to stress, we need to figure out what is the best approach to relieve the stress.”
Dunlevy said exercise is the number-one method people can use to alleviate stress in their lives.
When someone is stressed out and then the stress is relieved, the immediate reaction is relaxation. Other relaxation techniques include deep-breathing exercises, yawning, learning how to relax muscles, meditating, practicing yoga, biofeedback and massage therapy.
When he begins to train people in his home-based personal training service, the first thing Dunlevy tells them to do is to relax their shoulder muscles.
“Most people don’t even know how to relax the muscles in their shoulders because they are always tensing them,” he said. “That’s the first step people can take if they want to reduce stress.”
Jennifer Malecki, fitness director at the Wilfred R. Cameron Wellness Center in Washington, told health-care providers that exercise and healthy eating habits can prevent many chronic diseases, including arthritis, breast cancer, skin cancer, diabetes, heart disease and osteoporosis.
Malecki said it is important for parents to stress that their children develop healthy lifestyles at an early age, in an effort to break the ongoing cycle of obesity that is sweeping the nation.
Diabetes, a disease related to obesity and lack of exercise, can cause many complications, including heart disease, stroke, blindness, kidney failure and limb amputation, according to Malecki. An estimated 200,000 people die every year because of diabetes complications.
Statistics show that 950,000 Americans die of heart disease or stroke each year, Malecki said. One person dies of a heart attack or stroke every 33 seconds. Inactivity and poor diet lead to an estimated 300,000 deaths per year.
To prevent many of these diseases and their complications, health and fitness experts recommend cardiovascular and strength-training exercises.
“Everyone should be doing aerobic exercise three or four times a week for at least 20 to 40 minutes each time to increase their heart rate to their target zone,” Malecki said. “Everyone should be eating foods that are low in fat and cholesterol and taking a multi-vitamin once a day.”
Shelly Zone, physical therapy assistant at Mon Valley Hospital, said exercise is very important because more than half of the U.S. population is overweight, and the rate of childhood obesity has doubled during the past few years.
The National Institutes of Health has estimated that 64 percent of Americans are overweight or obese, and more than 60 percent do not get enough physical activity to stay healthy, she said.
Zone said some of the health risks associated with obesity are heart attack, stroke and high blood pressure.
“Obesity also accelerates the aging process,” she said. “It can also cause children to have low self-esteem because they are ridiculed by their peers.”
During the past several years, Zone said, the rate of obesity in the U.S. has increased by as much as 30 percent.
“We’re growing more concerned about the problem,” she said. “Americans have poor eating habits and a decreased activity level. It’s a tough habit to break because we’re a culture of trends. We’re eating high-calorie, high-fat, ready-made foods. We’re too busy to prepare nutritious meals for our families. We stop at fast food restaurants for dinner because we have to run our kids to soccer practice or dance classes.”
The problem is compounded by the lack of exercise. Zone said 36 percent of children do not participate in physical activity weekly, and most Americans do not exercise daily.
“Most Americans get very little exercise,” Zone said. “Most people feel that you need to go to a gym and hire a personal trainer if you want to get into shape. They don’t realize that low- and moderate-intensity exercise will help them. You can use the stairs instead of an elevator or do gardening and heavy housework to get some exercise.”
Many people claim that they don’t have time to exercise, but Zone said that while it can be a time-consuming activity, it’s necessary for people to set aside time for their health and well-being.
In her job as a physical therapy assistant, Zone said she has seen that patients who exercised regularly recover more quickly from injuries than those who haven’t exercised. People who exercise also have a positive attitude, which helps them during the recovery period.
“Our health is a priceless commodity,” she said. “We should take time every day to take care of ourselves. We should eat right and exercise to stay healthy and set a good example for our children to follow so we can break the cycle of obesity in this nation and in our communities.”