Three reasons exercise is less about bicep curls and more about longevity
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In our time poor lives of competing priorities, exercise can be seen as a self-indulgent activity— and I know that’s how its perceived because I hear it all the time in my two gyms.
The top reason for not exercising is “no time” due to work, family, insert-any-and-every-activity-that-isn’t-remotely-related-to-yourself. In 2023 we are getting better at seeing exercise as an important part of our overall health and well-being as opposed to exercising for the sole purpose of getting a smaller waist and bigger biceps (said no female ever. That’s another story). To clarify, there is nothing wrong with these goals, but when the outcome is perceived as ‘shallow’, it’s easy to see why exercise gets bumped down our list of priorities.
Today, I’m here to give you three reasons why exercise is LESS about exercise and MORE about living your BEST LIFE.
Hide peanut butter from yourself
Exercise may seem like a random collection of movements done if and when you have five minutes to yourself. But did you know all exercise has a practical application to the movements in your everyday life?
This isn’t a new concept. You might have heard of “functional” training. Functional training is quite literally exercises that replicate movements in your everyday life so you can execute them more comfortably and easily: think picking up your shopping bags (deadlift), putting peanut butter on the top shelf so it’s not in your eyeline anymore (shoulder press), overtaking slow walkers in the mall (interval training).
As much as we collectively hate burpees (I don’t, I’m not normal), a burpee is actually a life skill: the ability to get up and down off the floor. How many times have you heard awful stories of loved ones not being able to get up off the floor and having to wait hours for someone to find them and help them back to their feet?
Less drastically, this life skill translates to being able to play on the floor with pets and/or kids and the ability to get up comfortably and quickly.
Be unbreakable
Sore backs, sore knees, sore shoulders, sore bloody everything in the body that bends, extends or rotates (i.e. EVERY part).
While I’m not saying exercises fixes what ails ya, having strong supportive muscles around these areas sure helps. Remember seeing a lab skeleton in your science class back-in-the-day?
How you’d grab a bony arm of theirs and wave it around ‘Weekend at Bernies’ style* and remember how floppy/breakable that structure is? Now imagine that same fragile structure with muscle supporting those areas. Not so fragile now, eh?
*This was before the internet. We had nothing better to do.
Less murderous tendencies
The mental health benefits of exercise are being documented more and more. What I’m seeing on the ground in my facilities are clients walking in feeling flat and in a foul mood and in less than an hour leaving with a smile on their face and less murderous tendencies.
What I’m seeing is clients with self-doubt turning a corner after a few encouraging words (and to be fair, a bit of arguing back-and-forth) to try a new movement or lift a heavier weight. By the way, in these instances I’m never wrong.
And maybe—just maybe—these seemingly small accomplishments achieved in a safe space translate to everyday life. To prove you can do hard things. To give you the confidence to try something new. Even turning up to the gym when it’s the last thing you want to do flexes your resilience muscle and when it comes to mo-fos walking slowly in the mall…then maybe this isn’t a bad thing for all of us.
Feature image: Tina Nikolovski.
