Exercise is an opportunity, not a burden

If your goals include living a happy, healthy, and empowered life, then exercise is one of the best means you have to accomplish these goals.

• Re-connect with your own body: Get in touch with yourself by feeling your arms and legs enjoy the beauty of movement for the sake of pleasure rather than for work and chores.

• Reduce your risk for many common health problems: Exercise reduces the risk for and can help alleviate many of the most common health problems seen in clinical practice, including obesity, diabetes type-2, heart disease, depression, and chronic pain.

• Learn new things about the world or your favorite topic: With the simple technology available today, you can easily listen to an audiobook while you exercise.  Audiobooks help you accomplish several goals at once--physical exercise, time outdoors, and -- importantly -- time to learn about your favorite topic, whether it is a new language, new knowledge for work, new relationship skills, personal growth, or a piece of fiction or philosophy that you're interested in.

• Spend time with friends: Exercise can be a great way to spend time with friends, whether by walking, hiking, jogging, biking, playing sports like soccer.

• Spend time in nature: People who spend time in nature report less stress, anxiety, depression, and chronic pain.  Nature helps us relax and reconnect with life in a way that plastic, cement, and painted drywall just cannot provide.

• Increase your sense of autonomy and independence: Give your self-esteem a boost by achieving something out-of-the-ordinary for yourself.  Show yourself that you can do it.  Achieve your goals.  Attain the improved level of health and fitness that you really want and deserve for yourself.  Lose your low self-esteem weight, and give yourself the right to be happy and feel good about yourself.

 

“The health rewards of exercise extend far beyond its benefits for specific diseases.”

 

Exercise reduces blood clotting, lowers blood pressure, lowers cholesterol, improves glucose tolerance and insulin sensitivity, enhances self-image, elevates mood, reduces stress, creates a feeling of well-being, reinforces other positive life-style changes, stimulates creative thinking, increases muscle mass, increases basal metabolic rate, promotes improved sleep, stimulates healthy intestinal function, promotes weight loss, and enhances appearance.

 

“Furthermore, the ability of exercise to restore function to organs, muscles, joints, and bones is not shared by drugs or surgery.”[1]

 

Photo Copyright © 2009 by IBMRC, Julia Liebich, and Dr Alex Vasquez.  All rights reserved.

Exercise: Human existence has changed radically over the past few millennia, centuries, and decades, and one of the most profound changes has been in our relationship to physical activity. Paleologists and historical scientists agree that physical activity among humans is at its all-time historical low, and that levels of exertion that we now call “vigorous and frequent exercise” would have been completely normal in the daily lives of our ancestors, who engaged in at least four times more physical activity than their modern-day progeny.[2] It is interesting to fathom a time in which physical activity was such a normal part of daily life that there was no word for “exercise.”

“Although modern technology has made physical exertion optional, it is still important to exercise as though our survival depended on it, and in a different way it still does. We are genetically adapted to live an extremely physically active lifestyle.”[3]

Our current mode of compulsory primary and secondary education prioritizes “being still” over physical exertion and physical expression for the vast majority of students’ time. Thus having been separated from their inherent tendency to be physically active and emotionally expressive, many children grow into adults who have to be retaught to inhabit their bodies and to engage in physical activity on a daily basis. Basic science has proven that this is true: when animals are restrained, they show less activity when freed and no longer tied down. Conversely, when animals are rigorously exercised, they show higher levels of spontaneous physical activity when left to their own discretion. A probable sociological parallel is at work in human cultures where, under the guise of work and entertainment, people are corralled into lifestyles of physical inactivity in a wide range of apparently divergent activities. Watching television, driving a car, seeing a movie, doing computer/desk work at the office, attending a sports event or educational lecture, seeing the opera—all of these are simply different forms of sitting, of physical inactivity. Changing our social structure in a way that prioritizes life over work, such as moving toward a 4-day work week and/or a 6-hour work day, would allow people more time to live their lives, to pursue healthy diets and relationships, to be creative, and to engage in more physical activity; thus, “escape entertainment” such as fiction books and movies and processed “fast foods”—the latter of which are inherently unhealthy[4]—would become less necessary and less attractive.

 

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[1] Harold Elrick, MD. Exercise is Medicine. The Physician and Sportsmedicine - Volume 24 - No. 2 - February 1996

[2] Eaton SB, Cordain L, Eaton SB. An evolutionary foundation for health promotion. World Rev Nutr Diet 2001; 90:5-12

[3] O'Keefe JH Jr, Cordain L. Cardiovascular disease resulting from a diet and lifestyle at odds with our Paleolithic genome: how to become a 21st-century hunter-gatherer. Mayo Clin Proc. 2004 Jan;79(1):101-8. Available on-line at http://www.thepaleodiet.com/articles/Hunter-Gatherer%20Mayo.pdf on May 19, 2004

[4] For an additional perspective see movie by Morgan Spurlock (director). Super Size Me. www.supersizeme.com released in 2004

 

Exercise in the News

Exercise News -- Organization seeks to mix exercise into medical practice

Exercise News -- Organization seeks to increase use of exercise in medical practice