If you’ve read Live It NOT Diet! you recognize that “you can’t out-exercise a crappy diet.” And if you’ve read Eat Meat And Stop Jogging, you understand that “training to go further and more frequently does more harm than good”….
…especially when it involves excessive amounts of steady-state cardio!
BUT, that’s not to say you shouldn’t exercise!
Unfortunately, we’ve been taught to treat exercise as a method for “losing weight” and “burning calories,” when it should be a method for “gaining strength and muscle” and “building long-term health.”
There are plenty of reasons to exercise that have nothing to do with LOSING and everything to do with GAINING. Here are more than 25 of them:
- Increases metabolic rate
- Reduces inflammation
- Lowers risk of diabetes & the metabolic syndrome
- Reduces biomarkers for heart disease and dementia
- Prevents muscle and bone loss
- Improves metabolic and inflammatory status in skeletal muscle
- Boosts immune system and prevent sickness
- Increases mitochondrial enzyme content and activity (mitochondrial biogenesis)
- Slows aging and increases longevity (preserves telomere length)
- Reduces symptoms of Alzheimer’s and cognitive dysfunction
- May improve gut health
- Reduces stress and anxiety
- Improves memory, mental clarity, and learning ability
- Enhances mood and reduces depressive symptoms
- Increases productivity, creativity, and energy
- Builds confidence and improves body image
- Improves physical performance – posture, balance, mobility, coordination, flexibility
- Produces better fertility markers and hormone levels
- May help prevent cancer
- Reduces chronic musculoskeletal (specifically back) pain
- Promotes better sleep and proper circadian alignment
- Reduces all-cause morality (approx 30%!)
Interestingly, many of these benefits are achieved with 30-min of a low-intensity leisurely activity, like walking. However, we can further improve these markers by adding short, intense bouts of strength and muscle building.
Researchers in a 2014 study in the journal PLoS Medicine followed 99,316 older middle-aged women for 8 years to find a 67% lower risk of type 2 diabetes in those performing 150min/week of low-intensity aerobic activity (walking), and 60-min of muscle strengthening exercise, compared to those doing none.
Not surprisingly, this is pretty close to the regimen you can expect with 1% Fitness…which is a very minimal commitment to exercise when you think about it. The key is “Exercising to Build NOT Burn” and “Eating Your Way to Abs” instead of trying to run there.
Stay Lean!
Coach Mike
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