Fitness experts often disagree on matters of exercise and nutrition and many people get confused by the amount of information on the dos and do not’s of healthy living. However, when it comes to the need for physical activity there seems to be universal agreement among everyone – if you want to remain healthy and well, you must do intentional proper exercise regularly.
Just a few generations ago most people where highly active each day just to survive. Many people were engaged in hard manual labor, whether farming, hunting or building. In contrast modern day workers sit in front of a computer most of the day or perform other seated non labor intensive tasks, drive a car virtually everywhere, and spend the evening in front of a television.
It is an exciting time to be alive in human evolution with the speed of the advance of technology but there is a dark side to it as well. With the physical activity taken away to make our lives easy, comfortable and convenient we have become fat, lazy and sick and a multitude of serious health threats now parallel the march of technology.
The facts are our bodies have been built to be active – highly active and have not changed in tens of thousands of years. The capacity for hard physical work is programmed into the blueprint of our genes and is in fact necessary for our body to remain strong and healthy.
When we use our muscles properly they release chemicals in the form of ‘growth and repair’ hormones that tell our body that its strength is needed to hunt and feed others. When our body does not receive these signals, chemicals whisper to the cells and tissues to decay, degenerate and die.
We think that a pill or a doctor can fix us if we become ill. But this is not so, no doctor, medical drug or procedure can fix the human body once it has arrived at a broken down state. By the time symptoms of a ‘chronic lifestyle’ disease show itself it may have been decades in the making. You have to do more than hope you will not end up with one of these nasty diseases. You need to practice prevention and the way to do it is to keep your muscle strong right throughout your lifetime.
The exercise you need to do to work your muscular system through its ranges of motion under a load is proper strength training exercise. Don’t expect long slow low intensity stuff like walking jogging or cycling to be able to do this. Get yourself set up on a proper program that will do the job in the quickest and most efficient manner. Keep your ‘fun’ stuff for after you have done the necessary muscle building and maintaining activity as this is what is needed first and foremost to keep you strong.
We have to realize there is no easy way and there never will be a pill or a doctor that can replace keeping our body strong so it remains healthy and well. More knowledge is not going to help either. We already have all the answers and understand the human body better than ever before.
But we have to do more than ‘talk the talk’ we have to ‘walk the walk’ as well. The answer lies in the doing. So get yourself started on a proper strength training program at your local gym or fitness center and protect your future.
