Cardiac Friends is an outstanding program under way in Waukesha, Wisconsin, that enlists heart patients as volunteers to take dogs, who are housed at a local shelter, on regular walks healthful for both the human and canine participants. 
As reported by HealthDay News, the program is a partnership between the county’s Humane Animal Welfare Society and ProHealth Care (PHC), involving medically approved cardiac patients of PHC’s Waukesha Memorial Hospital.
These dog walkers have undergone procedures such as angioplasty, stent implantation and open heart surgery. Regular exercise with their canine companions lowers their risk for another cardiac event, helps control cholesterol levels, reduces blood pressure, helps counter depression and provides an opportunity to be needed and to make a difference.
From a shelter dog’s point of view, getting out of the kennel often to enjoy some physical recreation with a friendly, attentive visitor helps the animal stay mentally and physically fit while waiting for his or her new "forever home."
At this time, all of the patient-volunteers in the Cardiac Friends program (now approximately one year old) are men in their seventies. They visit the shelter three times per week, for an hour or longer, to get outdoors with their canine buddies, play fetch and walk along an enticing foot-path through an adjacent meadow.
Shelter coordinator Sara Falk told HealthDay News that the Cardiac Friends volunteers are among her favorites thanks to their reliability and since "… they are taking longer walks than a lot of the other walkers because they have fitness in mind."
appears in the new edition of the textbook Fitness: Theory & Practice, which is published by the Aerobics and Fitness Association of America (AFAA). 
Women who walked two or more hours per week had a 30 percent lower risk for any type of stroke.
Forms of physical activity other than walking were also addressed by the study. The women who were most active in their leisure time activities were 17 percent less likely to have any type of stroke compared to the least active women. Sattelmair said, "Though the exact relationship among different types of physical activity and different stroke subtypes remains unclear, the results of this specific study indicate that walking, in particular, is associated with lower risk of stroke."
As reported by HealthDay, a recent Norwegian study found that physical exercise and weight control may help ward off fibromyalgia. Researchers at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology followed 16,000 Norwegian women for 11 years, during which time 380 developed fibromyalgia. Below are several important findings from the study:
At the Colchester Campus of the UK’s University of Essex, research conducted by Dr. Jo Barton and Professor Jules Pretty has shown that a small amount of daily "green exercise" — for example, taking a stroll through a pleasant park or garden — will improve people’s mood, self-esteem and mental health. In fact, they found that just five minutes of such nature-based physical activity produced the greatest positive effect.
Here’s a tip for incorporating more physical activity into your daily schedule. American Senior Fitness Association (SFA) president Janie Clark suggests that, instead of sitting down for a long "gab-fest" with absent friends and family, you make a "walk and talk" phone date. You can coordinate with your sister in Seattle, your old roommate in Cleveland or your mother in Boca Raton to "meet" for a walk at a pre-set time.
But that is not what researchers found when they tracked 106 patients for two years following their knee replacements. Instead, 66 percent of the subjects had gained an average of 14 pounds.
The Mayo Clinic has some sound advice for persons with high blood pressure who are interested in taking up weightlifting, as follows:
Canadian researchers placed sedentary, moderately obese women who were recently post-menopausal or soon approaching menopause on a 16-week walking program. Their results, published in the journal Menopause and reported by Reuters Health, suggest that walking at a comfortable pace for 45 minutes per day, three days per week, can ameliorate some of the cares associated with menopause. Researchers noted that the 45-minute total can be accumulated by taking shorter walks during the course of a day.
