If you’re trying to quit smoking, ditch the pack and hit the gym.
This advice comes out of a new study by Western researchers, which shows exercise – when paired with smoking cessation aids like nicotine lozenges – can substantially reduce cigarette cravings.
“For individuals trying to refrain from picking up a cigarette, if you want to maximize craving relief, do both treatments – the lozenge and exercise – together. That’s the best bang for your buck,” said Harry Prapavessis, who teaches in the Faculty of Health Sciences and is the director of Western’s Exercise & Health Physiology Laboratory.
Prapavessis, along with former graduate students Amelia Tritter and Lyndsay Fitzgeorge, recently published a paper in Psychopharmacology, an international journal that covers the broad topic of how drugs affect behaviour. Their findings showed exercise provides a substantial boost to craving reduction when paired with pharmacological efforts to quit smoking.
Working with 30 habitual smokers, Prapavessis and his team asked participants to stop smoking the night before arriving at his lab. The smokers were randomly divided into two groups, with one group receiving a nicotine lozenge to help curb cravings and the other receiving the lozenge while also engaging in moderate bouts of exercise.
Study participants who received the lozenge alone reduced their cravings by 30 per cent, while participants who combined nicotine lozenges with exercise reduced cravings by 45 per cent.
‘We know the lozenge provides craving relief. And we know exercise, on its own, provides craving relief. But we found exercise could provide 10-15 per cent extra in craving relief with the lozenge,” Prapavessis said.
“This was the first time we’ve been able to show the benefits of these two types of treatments – together. We’re not advocating that exercise should replace the lozenge. We’re trying to find complementary treatments that might maximize craving benefits,” he explained.
Study participants engaged in moderate to intense exercise for relatively short periods of time, Prapavessis noted. This would constitute something most anyone could do for 10-15 minutes at a time. The intensity doesn’t need to be extreme, just enough to increase the heart rate.
“The intensity of exercise plays a role. Low-level intensity doesn’t produce the same kind of relief as moderate or vigorous exercise,” he added.
“We advocate for moderate – it makes you break into a light sweat and you start to have a bit more difficulty carrying on an active conversation. There’s no added value if you go to the extreme level. ”
While the benefits of exercise in smoking cessation efforts have been proven, Prapavessis is still working to understand the physiological reasons behind the effect. Even so, he wants to see advocates of exercise in the medical and health communities when dealing with smokers.
“That’s part of the problem. We have to find ways of getting this information out there, through the proper channels. We could have doctors or pharmaceutical companies giving out lozenges and saying, ‘Have you tried them with exercise?’ What exercise can do for health is unbelievable. That’s not new – but these findings are new,” he said.
Tobacco use kills more than five million people per year and smoking is the world’s single most preventable cause of death. Prapavessis is working with health professionals and pharmaceutical companies now, sending his paper along and working to get its findings into the public sphere.