Dr. Kerry Courneya

So we set that guideline around 150 and additionally getting up to 300 can be more.

And generally the guidelines just sort of double weight vigorous minutes.

So when we say it can be 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous, you kind of get double credit.

for the vigorous intensity exercise or any combination of the two.

It doesn't have to be all moderate or all vigorous.

You can mix it up as well.

But that's roughly the extra benefit of the vigorous is this kind of double weighting that you're probably getting about twice the benefit as you might get with moderate intensity exercise.

That's a great question.

And so there is some studies that link both pre-diagnosis exercise and post-diagnosis exercise to better cancer outcomes.

And some of those studies show that, yes, even the amount of exercise you were doing before diagnosis might improve your outcomes after diagnosis, independent of what you do after diagnosis.

Some of it is that the exercise might alter the cancer itself.

So even if it doesn't prevent the cancer, it might be a less aggressive cancer or genetically different type of cancer, or it might be more of an early stage cancer.

So some of it's related to changing the cancer itself.

But even if exercise doesn't prevent the cancer, it may delay the cancer.

So someone who gets diagnosed at age 70 might say, oh, I exercise all my life and I still got cancer, but they might've been diagnosed at 65 without the exercise.

So sometimes it's just delaying the cancer.

And then I think the pre-diagnosis exercise helps you get fit and ready

for cancer treatments.

And so you can think of exercise kind of this whole pre-diagnosis time as the entire prehabilitation part.

It's preparing you for getting diagnosed with these chronic diseases.