- The ARC - California Edition -

A Healthy Heart

Scientists have long been aware that people who exercise daily manage to delay or even avoid heart disease. There is hardly a single health magazine which does not RE-proclaim in each of their issues the need to visit the gym and exercise four or five times a week.

"Everywhere you turn today", there is another scientific report which clearly shows that such activity can cut the risk of your having a heart attack by 40% to 50%.

But, now let us look over a few of the Individual Program Plans (IPPs) written for people who don't have the ability to read those scientific reports. Within the ARC movement, we call them clients. Where do we find in their IPP’s the definition of physical activities which would lead to achieving this type of result? If these activities are actually written in the IPP, are the planned functions truely being carried out?

We can't solely blame our ARC program planning people for this type of result. A research project, which started about 12 years ago, was quite clear in defining the benefit of exercise. Every few years, these researchers questioned in detail 22,000 PHYSICIANS about their exercise habits. During the period of this study, about a thousand of the doctors had suffered heart attacks; 300 had died from them.

These researchers reported that groupings of the doctors who had exercised once or twice a week, had about 25% fewer heart attacks. The group of doctors who exercised five times or more a week, cut the risk of having a heart attack by over 40%.

Their conclusion: twenty minutes a day of exercise is optimum for both men and women, whether you are a brilliant scientist, or you are sitting on your bottom working in a sheltered workshop. Do your ARC Programs include exercise for your clients? Check it out ! ! !