Effects of a 10-Week High-Intensity Exercise Intervention on College Staff with Psychological Burnout and Multiple Risk Factors.

AbstractThis study examined the effect of a 10-week physical exercise program on the health status of college staff. Eighty-one participants were pre-tested on 22 variables including physical fitness, biochemical status, psychological health, and morphological measures. Participants in an experimental group (n = 61) received a 10-week intervention consisting of aerobic activities and weight training whereas the remainder (n = 20) constituted a control group. The intervention program was monitored and controlled using the Cooper points system so that the exercise intensity increased gradually and the exercise session duration decreased across the ten weeks. The posttest results indicated that the experimental group had significant improvement on most of the 22 variables, but there was no improvement in any variable within the control group. In addition, those with more than three coronary artery disease risk factors, emotional exhaustion, or high waist-hip ratio in the experimental group improved in most of the variables as well. Finally, the findings demonstrated significant correlations between change in training intensity and change in selected variables for those with both emotional exhaustion and more than three risk factors of coronary artery disease in the experimental group.Key words: multiple risk factors, job stressIntroductionStaff at academic institutions work in an increasingly demanding environment as the academic sector has undergone large-scale organizational restructuring, downsizing and government funding cuts in recent years (Gillespie, Walsh, Winefields, Dua & Souch, 2001; Otero-Lopez, Marino, & Bolano, 2008). Various studies have reported psychological distress, low job satisfaction, high levels of job stress and job insecurity among staff at tertiary institutions (Gillespie et al.; Lacy & Sheehan, 1997; Tytherleigh, Webb, Cooper, & Ricketts, 2005; Winefield & Jarrett, 2001). Psychological distress as a precursor of cardiac risk, cardiovascular disease and cardiovascular reactivity has recently received much attention, and the general conclusion is that psychological distress is a health and social issue of utmost importance.Stress only becomes a health hazard when coping resources have been depleted, which means a person could report high levels of stress without necessarily presenting with poor health. Current theory is that chronic stress leads to a higher allostatic load or elevated coronary risk factors such as blood pressure, waist/hip ratio, percentage body fat, total cholesterol/ high density lipoprotein ratio, and glucose intolerance. These risk factors keep on spiralling into increasingly worse physical and psychemotional health (Krantz & McCeney, 2002; Melamed, Shirom, Toker, Beliner, & Shapira, 2006).In essence chronic stress seems to cause a clustering of risk factors, and the risk associated with any particular risk factor varies widely depending on the amount of clustering. Individuals with multiple marginal abnormalities or borderline risk factors - who are often at greater risk than people with one or two major risk factors - are easily overlooked for aggressive treatment with a categorical risk factor count approach. Cost-effective targeting of individuals with cardiovascular diseases for aggressive control of their risk therefore requires multivariable risk assessment. This tendency of risk factors to cluster has also been attributed to insulin resistance (or metabolic syndrome) and its associated precursor abdominal obesity (Kannel, D'Agostino, Sullivan, & Wilson, 2004).Psychological distress has been linked to both abdominal obesity and insulin resistance but has as yet not been thoroughly explored for its cluster-causing effect (Melamed et al., 2006). Psychological distress in association with abdominal obesity and multiple arteriosclerotic disease risk factors may present a lethal combination and it is important to determine how such individuals will respond to a conservative non-drug treatment modality such as physical activity. …