Why Exercise is Crucial to Life

I was born in 1971 to a first generation German immigrant and a sweet mid-westerner. My dad played soccer in college and as long as I can remember, he exercised every day, usually twice (when NO ONE was exercising outside of young athletes). My mom and I started doing aerobics in the 80's and it's probably the biggest reason why I taught group fitness for 30 years!

Exercise brings people together and releases endorphins unlike any other experience. I spent most of my career trying to convince people that exercise is a vital, if not THE most important part, of being healthy.

Healthy has lots of definitions but most can agree that it broadly includes being as disease resistant as possible. Ironically, a google search brings up the WHO, the dictionary and a myriad of opinions and politics about how we define health. We CAN all agree that health includes not just exercise, but lots of other things, like sleep, stress management, nutrition, and then it broadens into our fulfillment of life and happiness. But let's just narrow it down to exercise and nutrition behaviors for the sake of this article! :)

Being an avid exercise proponent, it was easy for me to buy into the argument that as long as you exercised intensely and frequently enough, your food choices were less critical. While that may be true for some people, like athletes or exercise pros, it is NOT true for most adults. In fact, I will now argue that even though exercise plays a very crucial role in our wellbeing, it does not properly accommodate the standard American diet and if we continue to use exercise as a balance for a diet full of fried and processed foods, we will not survive.

Here is what exercise will do for us that is vital to living well: it makes our muscle cells more capable of using and storing sugar. When our muscle is insulin sensitive (because it doesn't take too much insulin for our muscle to open up to receive blood sugar), we have the ability to fight, flight and function like champions.

Exercise does not help us lose body fat. It makes us stronger, more agile, balanced and powerful, but it is not the equal part of a body recomposition equation.

Nutrition behaviors are where that magic happens. (I've got lots to say about this later!)

The more often and regularly we exercise, the better we will be at fighting diseases. Don't let more days go by before you start because it can be as easy as walking around your neighborhood or as challenging as a fitness competition. You get to choose how hard your workouts are, but don't choose to not participate.