This is a fun, quick episode. This is really and episode to get you moving.
With today's topic, I'm going to give you some insider perspective. I see all aspects of health every week. Some people are struggling to rebuild their bodies and some are setting new records for strength.
Talk to any doctor and they'll ask about your exercise and tell you it's good for you and you might even need more.
What if you didn't exercise for a year?
Did your heart just stop? Would you be relieved?
Ask yourself this...
What do you ultimately want from exercise?
Do you want to be healthier?
-Great, exercise can usually do that.
Do you want to look better?
-Exercise might help, you might need something else.
Feel better?
-Exercise might help, you might need something else.
Lose weight?
-Exercise is definitely the slowest way to do this.
Maintain your strength?
-Exercise is your ticket.
Gain strength?
-Gotta go with exercise again. (Really just free weights are the way to go) Yes, I realize body weight works for a while.
Do you want more endurance?
Do you want some competition?
Do you want a challenge?
I normally try and give you something useful to do and think about at the beginning of the week, but this has proven to be a very large topic.
We can all agree that you need some level of activity every day. I prefer that you be active. You don't need to join a gym for basic levels of healthy activity. Get out and walk, run, garden, do yoga, chase your dog, anything that gets you moving.
If you have a sedentary job and lifestyle then this is where to start. Get out, and get moving. Life is about movement: your blood, your muscles, your lymph, your spine. If you don't move a muscle for a month, it dies off. If a joint in your spine doesn't move, it dies. If you've seen bone spurs on an X-ray, that's spinal death.
If you are already exercising, great, keep it up.
Now ponder if what you are doing actually matters. The body is a system. It works together and is meant to be trained that way.
How many times (sarcasm is coming) do you curl your hamstring at your job? Do bicep curls help you work around the house?
My point is... If the body works as a unit, don't try and train it in parts. You could think of it like this, exercise to be useful. Probably the worst thing to happen to exercise is the invention of nautilus machines.
If you are stuck doing machine based training, start working your way out of that. It just sets you up for future injuries, and muscle imbalances. It helps give you "show muscle" but not "go muscle".
This is the last type, and by far the trickiest. If you love to exercise and it is a large part of your life, slow down and read this section. Let me tell you the story of Jill. She shows up in the office one day with her 2 kids and with her husband. Her husband was the patient, not her.
Her hubby mentions that she has back pain, while I'm adjusting him. So after some casual conversation I come to learn that she has pain so bad she can't even sit at the dinner table with her family. Are you kidding me!
She had just adapted her life and "pain" became her norm, so much so, that she didn't even think it was abnormal not to "sit" at dinner. Her perception of life and pain was way out of balance.
Come to find out, she's also exercising 2 hours a day to make herself feel better. She's using exercise to combat pain and loss of energy.
You might be thinking "what's wrong with that?"
Sounds like a good plan, right?
Exercise is stimulating, fun, and makes you feel good, but it can be used as a crutch. Here's how you tell. If you stop exercising for 3-7 days and you feel depressed, tired, or more aches and pains. That's who you really are.
If you are a hard core exerciser and keep finding that you are doing more and more exercise, you are living off the narcotic-like effect of the stimulation.
You can get away with that for awhile because you have reserves of minerals to draw upon. It's a very interesting phenomenon. As the reserves deplete, your natural ability to produce energy declines. The energy loss, starts to change your brain and numbs it, so you can still function. You actually start having perception problems. Just like Jill. She had no idea how bad she was.
You can feel healthy, but your not. Let me give you an example...me. I was working out, hard, in 2014. The kind of workouts that end in laying on the floor, gasping for air. Sometimes I really dislike being the Guinea pig.
So, in the fall of 2014 I did a tissue mineral analysis. Here is what the lab told me.
Basically, I felt really good, but I was burning through minerals at an accelerated rate. If I kept going, I was going to be in trouble.
What kind of trouble? Well, everything you do, your life, is revolving around your ability to make energy.
Do you know why most people succumb to cancer? They run out of energy.
Energy and the lack of energy should be taken very seriously. If you've read this far, I'm going to give you a real gem. There is one easy, easy way to tell if you are in trouble. Whether you feel good or not. Remember exercise and other stimulants can trick you. If you have grey hair, you are running low on energy. There is much more science behind that, but that's a whole other email.
Summary for you. Exercise is good for you, but maybe this will help make it better.
1. If you are doing nothing, get out and be active.
2. If you are active, do something useful.
3. If you are dependent on exercise, stop for 7 days. See who you really are.
P.S. If you do have grey hair, you should get a hair analysis done. It's the best way to look at minerals.
