The World Health Organization’s (WHO) Global Status Report on Cancer 2026: The Future We Choose Together delivers a message that should resonate strongly with everyone working to establish Exercise Oncology as part of comprehensive cancer care: the greatest problem in cancer control is increasingly not what we know, but our failure to implement what we know.
The global numbers are sobering. An estimated 20.6 million people were diagnosed with cancer worldwide in 2024, and annual diagnoses are projected to reach 35 million by 2050. One in five people will develop cancer during their lifetime. When the impact on close family members is considered, WHO estimates that approximately 92% of the world’s population will be affected by cancer at least once during their lifetime.
For CancerFitness.org, however, one of the report’s most important messages appears in an area that has historically received too little attention: what happens to people during and after cancer treatment.
Physical Inactivity Is a Worsening Cancer-Control Problem
The WHO identifies physical inactivity as a worsening global trend. Fewer than half of countries have a current, funded national physical-activity policy, while 31% of adults fail to meet physical-activity recommendations and 80% of adolescents are insufficiently active. Obesity is also worsening, with no country having halted its rise.
These findings are highly relevant to Exercise Oncology.
The report itself is a global cancer-control document, not an Exercise Oncology guideline, and it does not specifically recommend structured Exercise Oncology programs. Nevertheless, its findings provide a powerful systems-level rationale for them.
Exercise Oncology can help translate the broad goal of increasing physical activity into individualized, clinically supervised interventions appropriate for people living with cancer, including patients whose treatment, comorbidities, deconditioning, fatigue or functional limitations make generic advice to “exercise more” inadequate.
The Missing Link: Survivorship and Rehabilitation
Perhaps the report’s strongest connection to Exercise Oncology is its assessment of survivorship care and rehabilitation.
WHO classifies global progress in this area as “insufficient.” Only 52% of national cancer control plans include strategies addressing post-treatment follow-up care, and available evidence indicates substantial deficits in rehabilitation access, particularly in low- and middle-income countries.
That finding should matter enormously to cancer centers developing survivorship programs.
Cancer treatment can leave patients living with functional impairment and other persistent treatment consequences. Exercise Oncology belongs within the broader rehabilitation and supportive-care infrastructure designed to help patients maintain or recover physical function and participate more fully in life during and after treatment.
Importantly, this should not be viewed merely as an optional wellness service added after cancer treatment has ended. The WHO report argues that the global cancer agenda must “value care as highly as cure” and recognizes that many people diagnosed with cancer will live with the disease rather than simply move from treatment to cure.
That is precisely the environment in which Exercise Oncology should be organized as a component of the cancer-care continuum.
What This Means for Organizing Exercise Oncology Programs
The WHO report contains another lesson that may be even more important for program leaders: isolated interventions are not enough.
WHO concludes that comprehensive, integrated approaches produce better outcomes than isolated disease-specific interventions and calls for coordinated action across health systems and communities.
For Exercise Oncology, this argues against building exercise services as stand-alone fitness programs disconnected from oncology care.
Instead, an organized Exercise Oncology program should be integrated into the patient’s cancer pathway. In practical terms, that supports a model incorporating:
- Routine identification and referral of appropriate patients from oncology teams.
- Baseline assessment of physical function, treatment effects and exercise needs.
- Individualized exercise prescriptions that can change as treatment and functional status change.
- Coordination with oncology, rehabilitation, nutrition, psychological support and survivorship services.
- In-person, home-based and virtual options to reduce geographic and access barriers.
- Longitudinal follow-up, extending from active treatment into long-term survivorship when appropriate.
- Defined outcomes and data collection so programs can demonstrate participation, functional outcomes, patient experience, safety and value.
This last point is especially important. WHO emphasizes that cancer-control programs need to be designed, funded, implemented and evaluated, rather than existing only as well-intentioned plans.
Exercise Oncology should adopt the same standard.
From “Nice to Have” to Cancer-Care Infrastructure
The WHO report also challenges how cancer resources are allocated. It observes that expensive technologies and treatments often receive disproportionate attention and financing while survivorship, palliative care, social innovation and human capital remain underfunded.
This has major implications for Exercise Oncology.
Cancer programs understandably invest heavily in surgery, radiation therapy, systemic therapies, imaging and new technologies. But a truly comprehensive cancer system must also be invested in helping patients function, recover and live well with and beyond cancer.
Exercise Oncology represents one component of that broader investment in supportive care, rehabilitation and survivorship.
WHO further notes that nearly 40% of new cancer cases are preventable through risk factors for which evidence-based interventions already exist and concludes that cooperation across disciplines and sectors is fundamental to improving cancer outcomes.
A Framework Exercise Oncology Can Adopt
On page 8 of the executive summary, WHO organizes its recommendations around three major shifts: better capabilities, better protections and better value. It calls for integrated cancer services, participation by people with lived cancer experience, community health promotion, better data, system-wide solutions and research aligned with patient and public-health needs.
Those principles provide an excellent framework for Exercise Oncology programs.
Better capabilities mean developing trained personnel, referral pathways and scalable exercise services.
Better protections mean making those services accessible, not merely to highly motivated, affluent survivors, but to older adults, people with advanced cancers, rural populations and others who face barriers to participation.
Better value means measuring whether Exercise Oncology improves outcomes that matter to patients and health systems and demonstrating where appropriately designed programs provide meaningful clinical and economic benefits.
The CancerFitness.org Perspective: The Implementation Gap Is Our Opportunity
The WHO summarizes the central challenge of cancer care in 2026 remarkably clearly: “The primary gap is no longer a gap in knowledge, but a gap between what we know and what we do, between what we plan and what we implement.”
That statement could equally describe the challenge facing Exercise Oncology.
The scientific case supporting physical activity and appropriately prescribed exercise across the cancer continuum has grown substantially. The next challenge is organizational: How do we move exercise from recommendation to implementation?
That requires more than telling patients to be physically active. It requires systems that identify patients, assess them, prescribe appropriate exercise, provide supervision when needed, monitor progress, address barriers, communicate with oncology teams and measure outcomes.
The WHO report therefore provides something particularly valuable to the Exercise Oncology movement. It places physical inactivity, rehabilitation, survivorship, implementation, integration and value within the larger global discussion about how cancer care itself must evolve.
Call to Action
Cancer centers, oncology practices, hospitals and survivorship programs should begin treating structured Exercise Oncology as part of the infrastructure of comprehensive cancer care.
The question should increasingly move from “Should we encourage cancer patients to exercise?” to “How do we build a sustainable system that makes safe, individualized exercise accessible throughout the cancer journey?”
At CancerFitness.org, our goal is to help close that implementation gap, by advancing education, encouraging collaboration among oncology and exercise professionals, and promoting Exercise Oncology programs that transform evidence into everyday cancer care.
The evidence increasingly tells us what to do. The challenge now is to organize cancer care so that we actually do it.
Reference: Global Status Report on Cancer 2026- The Future We Choose Together- Executive Summary
