PHYSICAL ACTIVITY FOR BETTER MENTAL HEALTH AND STRONGER IMMUNITY
Being physically active for overall health and wellbeing is important in everyone’s lives. Establishing and maintaining ways to keep your body moving should be a high priority during times of stress, anxiety and depression to support your mental health and immunity.
Research shows that physical activity releases serotonin which is the feel good hormone naturally produced by your body. Getting a daily dose of exercise will help to ease the physical and mental symptoms of anxiety, fear, anger and grief that you may be experiencing in relation to a stressful life event.
Being active reduces your risk of heart disease, some cancers and type 2 diabetes. It also strengthens your muscles and bones, helps to maintain body weight and can reduce symptoms of depression.
Australia’s Physical Activity Guidelines for Adults (aged 18-65 years) recommends that adults be active on most, preferably all, days of the week. Adults should accumulate 150 to 300 minutes (2 ½ to 5 hours) of moderate intensity physical activity or 75 to 150 minutes (1 ¼ to 2 ½ hours) of vigorous intensity physical activity, or an equivalent combination of both moderate and vigorous activities, each week. Included in this time, adults should do muscle strengthening activities on at least 2 days each week.
Whether you wish to start becoming more active or need to increase the frequency or intensity of your workouts, there are many free and accessible ways to move your body every day. If you are unemployed or studying/working from home, you may have more time in your day to devote to your health than other people who spend 1-2 hours per day commuting to and from their workplace. If you are a parent of young children, you have an opportunity to create healthy habits together.
If you’re more motivated to exercise with other people you can invite a family member or friend to be your fitness buddy. Other options are to explore on-line sources of guided exercises classes or simply venture out to your local park/river/beach where you will feel a sense of camaraderie with like-minded people out for their daily dose of physical activity.
Physical activity is an essential component of self care for a healthy body and positive mind.
Set your own goals which are unique to your ability level, personal circumstances and lifestyle.
Connect your goals to your own set of values and beliefs to remain focussed on your outcomes.
Schedule time into your daily or weekly calendar and stay committed to your routine, with flexibility.
Identify and address any barriers to your physical activity goals and ask for support when needed.
Ways to be physically active
In The Home
At Work
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We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to