We are all intelligent people and know we should move and exercise. But, why should we exercise? First, we have to define what we mean by exercise. Exercise is a purposeful activity. That means setting time aside for it. Whereas movement and daily activity are just how many steps you are doing through your regular day. Exercise has multiple benefits and in part one, we are going to talk about the mental and emotional benefits.
When we first think of exercise we only think about the physical benefits. We forget how our physical movement affects our mental state. For example, there have been studies on the effect of just smiling. This can change your mental state right away when you hold a smile. I challenge you to just start laughing right now and see what happens when you continue to fake laugh. I know anytime I exercise, or my client leaves the weight room they are a different person than when they came in. Many times, afternoon clients may have a difficult day at work but feel much better after a workout session. All I have to say is EXERCISE!!!
Another thing it does is helps people during the weight loss process and makes it much easier to keep weight off. There have been studies of a group that just diets and another group that diets and exercises. The group that diets and doesn't exercise may have the same or a little more weight loss but does not have as big of metabolism change. This happens because when you just diet you may lose muscle. Muscle is an expensive tissue and uses more energy throughout your day. Therefore, during the weight loss process if we can keep as much muscle as we can, then we will be able to keep our metabolism higher and maintain our body weight, or continue to lose weight. This one factor alone is why people can sustain it for their lives vs. just months or a year. The more muscle you have, the more food you can get away with eating in the sedentary lifestyle we have created today. Exercise is vital to make sure we maintain health.
Now that we are talking about muscle and keeping it, we need to use it and move it. When we move muscle, it does more than just move the body but makes the bones stronger. By adding a load to a muscle, it will pull on the bone and when it pulls bone, it damages the bone. This is a good thing since the body has a self-healing process and adaptation. This allows for bone repair. Currently, we have a rise in osteopenia cases, especially among older women. This even happens to runners’ upper bodies if they do not lift weights and cause stress to the upper body. It is important to create stress in the body.
This leads to the last idea of part 1 that we need to exercise to create more energy. The reason you have more energy when you do the appropriate amount of exercise is that the body adapts and tells your mind you need to create more ATP for the next day’s energy. This concept is easy to understand. Let’s think about when we create movement with a car by pushing it. It gets easier and the car starts to roll easier and easier as you first move it. It’s all about momentum and the body senses that. But if we were to push a little then stop, then push the car again it’s hard to roll down as far because of lack of momentum. Ultimately your body adapts to the route you want to go. If you sleep all day, it will produce less and less energy and if you work out appropriately, it will produce more energy to handle your new capacity level.
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