The best, the quickest, the easiest way to improve your life is to move. It's a magic elixir which can change a tired, depressed, listless life. Instead, with just a little moving, one can feel vibrant and enjoy a sense of well-being and accomplishment. While toning and muscle building movement has some benefits, getting the oxygen moving through your brain, muscles, and other organs with aerobic exercise is best.
Where there is life, there is moving. Even plants have movement as they absorb nutrients and bend toward the light. The simple amoeba moves by wiggling and undulating, divides to reproduce, and wraps themselves around their dinners. So, if it's good enough for the single cells, why should a member of the most complex species on record get away with surviving as a couch potato? The answer: they can't, at least not very well.
Some of the benefits of aerobic exercise include:
- Regulates appetite
- Blood pressures, stroke, heart disease, and other circulatory problems are improved.
- Oxygen to the brain seems to increase people's ability to think, reason, and remember
- Makes muscles stronger and bones denser
- Helps alleviate depression and improves mood
- Thought to be beneficial for preventing alzheimers up to 50%
- Improves the immune system
- Decreases risk of diabetes and cancer.
Life is movement and as necessary as the need for sleeping, eating, and breathing. Without exercise things begin to slowly fall apart. Atrophy becomes the enemy. And it doesn't take a lot of exercise or hard work to battle atrophy.
Does this mean that you have to go and run on the tread mill at the gym or go to some hardcore boot camp workout? By the time you finish your work day, complete your commute, and do what needs to be done around your house, you and most people don't feel like going to a gym or to a program. Most research indicates that moderate aerobic exercise for 30 minutes twice a week does the trick. This might include something as simple as a brisk walk. It might be a square dancing class. There are countless ways to include an easy aerobic workout into your day. It should be uncomplicated. It should be fun. And it should be something that you will do regularly.
Could you do more if you wanted to? Absolutely! Just be careful not to overdo it or to make it such a burden that you don't feel like starting or once you start you want to quit. If you're like most people you may even find well considered exercise addictive.
It doesn't hurt to supplement this with short "incidental" workouts throughout the day. Walk to the local stores. Park at the end of the parking lot. Take the stairs. Shake your leg as though you're nervous while you're sitting at your desk. The principle is to move when you can.
Life is movement, but hibernation feels natural in the winter. This season above all may be the best time to be creative and figure out how to move. Walk around inside the mall. Relearn to ice skate - you don't have to be good at it. Just move.int
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