Physical activity refers to any activity that gets your body moving such as stretching, walking, jogging, running, cycling, swimming, participating in sports, yoga, and more.
Regular, structured, and purposeful physical activity can help you reach your weight loss goal. Even if you do not lose weight, physical activity can still help reduce liver fat, improve liver tests, cholesterol levels, and how your body uses insulin, in addition to making you feel better.
There are many types of physical activities but important categories to know are:
- Aerobic activities – These activities make your heart beat faster and make you breathe harder than normal. Examples include: walking, jogging, running, bicycling, swimming, dancing, and sports such as tennis, soccer, hockey and basketball. You can do aerobic activity at different levels of intensity:
- Light-intensity – common day-to-day activities requiring minimal effort.
- Moderate-intensity – makes you work and breathe harder than light-intensity activity. On a scale from 0 to 10, moderate-intensity activity is in the 5 to 6 range. To give you an idea of intensity, while performing moderate-intensity activity, you would be able to talk, but not sing.
- High-intensity - On a scale from 0 to 10, high-intensity activity is in the 7 to 8 range. When doing high-intensity activity you can’t say more than a few words without having to stop and catch your breath.
- Muscle-strengthening activities – these activities improve the strength of your muscles, including lifting weights, push-ups, sit-ups, climbing stairs, working with resistance bands, shoveling snow, and digging dirt. These are also called resistance-training exercises.
- Balance and Flexibility activities – These activities improve your balance as well as flexibility and range of motion of your muscles and joints, including yoga, and using a wobble board.
It is recommended that patients with MASLD perform a minimum of 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week. If you do not exercise, it is important that you slowly build up to this level and then advance further: start low, go slow. An additional two to three 20-minute sessions of muscle-strengthening exercises per week can also provide benefit.
