The verdict is in: Medical study after medical study
verifies exercise is critically connected to all aspect of health – physical health,
mental health, emotional health … maybe even spiritual health. In the short
term, adequate exercise maintains and stimulates all aspects of your body from
your skeletal system to your muscular, circulatory, respiratory, immune, and digestive system. Exercise
even helps you think faster and clearer.
In the long term, exercise helps you reduce and/or even
prevent obesity, diabetes, heart disease, respiratory ailments, Alzheimer’s
Disease, and some forms of cancer. That’s
a whole lot proven benefits from one mechanism. For good day-to-day health and long
life, exercise combined with good diet are the heavy hitters that outperform
just about every other factor (except maybe stress reduction and sleep). Exercise
puts medications and drugs to shame in keeping you physically able and mentally
happy. In fact the need for drugs and medications is usually symptomatic that
the components of a good lifestyle (ample exercise, a good diet, stress
reduction, and adequate sleep) are out of whack and have left you out of
balance.
Whether you’re an evolutionist who believes we evolved as
moving animals, or a creationist who believes we were designed by a greater
power long before this modern era of inactivity, research has made it obvious that
the need for movement is part of our DNA. Exercise is the closest thing we have
to cure all. And it is one of the main pillars supporting long life. Wherever
we study groups of people who enjoy unusually long lifespans, we see the same
components repeating themselves – a good diet with enough of (but not too much
of) the right foods, societal mechanisms to reduce stress and, yup, plenty of
movement.
The bad news here is that modern life is intent (maybe even
hell bent) on eliminating movement from life. Most of us spend our life at home
sitting, then we sit as we drive to work … where we spend the work day sitting.
In the evening and on weekends, most of us sit a lot more. We sit when we go
out to eat, go to shows, or watch sporting events. Increasingly activities
where we’re forced to move – like mowing the lawn – are hired out. The modern
lifestyle is not all it’s cracked up to be. It may be the anti-recipe … and it’s
killing us.
The good news is that it doesn’t take a tremendous amount of
movement on a daily basis to make a big difference in how our bodies and brains
function. The rough target, research suggests, is about 30 minutes of brisk
movement (exercise) that elevates our heart rates and breathing rates above the
plateau where they sit most of the day. Getting aerobic by jogging or biking at
a fast clip for 30 minutes a day is even better than walking quickly, and yet
very significant health gains come from any form of movement (walking, biking,
mowing, raking, vigorous gardening) that boost our heart and breathing rates
for half an hour a day.
Move! It’s more than good for you, it’s one of the main
elixirs for long life.
How do you work movement into your daily life and make it
easy to accomplish each day? For many of us, walking or biking different loops leaving
from our homes or from work is the easiest, fastest way to get the job done. Walking
to (or back from work) is another simple way to work movement into the daily
routine. If your work place is out of striking range for walking or biking,
park about two miles from work each day and walk the rest of the way in.
If you’ve been avoiding exercise for years, we’re going to
be honest and recognize that starting a regular routine of moving is hard. It’s
work, it requires effort, it may seem boring, it may feel painful. Your
experience the first few times you get out the door may make it doubly hard to
keep at it. That’s why we recommend you look for ways to spice things up, make
it interesting, add a fun factor to the exercise. This is where hiking, biking, outdoor recreation, adding
some adventure to the routine come in. Use our resources here at
WenatcheeOutdoors to add adventure and a little more spice to the exercise.
Explore the great hikes and bike rides that are so nearby us here in your Central
Washington. You’ll see amazing country, enjoy new scenery, sight wildlife, have
an adventure… You’ll find yourself thinking, “This is beautiful… and it is fun.”
If moving is fun you’ll do it more, and if you do it more
you’ll get stronger, and once you’re stronger moving is easier, which makes it
more fun, and if it’s more fun… You see where this positive feedback loop is
headed? If you keep at it in a few weeks
you’ll miss it when you miss it. That is, on those days when you can’t get out,
both mind and body will complain about missing their daily dose of movement.
A few weeks and an arsenal of beautiful places to walk or
ride… that’s all it takes to round the corner on a different way of living and
a whole lot of health benefits related to movement.