One of the most common question people ask me why their body stopped changing even thou they are doing their exercises. I always follow their question with a question of my own; I ask them what is exercise? I see that most people don’t understand the difference between activity and exercise.
I decided to look up the definitions of each word on the Internet and realized very quickly the distinction is not very clear. So, I’m going to clear up all the confusion once and for all. To realize the difference I’m going to make a very bold statement. Exercise Is Not Important! The people that live the longest in this world rarely or never exercise. In fact the people that exercise the most tend to die young, a very good example of this is world class athletes, life expectancy of 68. Compare that to Okinawans of Japan who are well know for its longevity, life expectancy for women is 86 and 78 for men. Now, there a lot of factors that goes into those numbers but it’s good to understand that exercise needs to be applied properly.
Ok, so my meaning of exercise is, a planned routine looking for adaptive changes. Let me explain. So, exercise is challenging your body to improve your physical ability to do a task, that task can be anything from walking to dancing to being stronger. This is an individual matter, what might be exercise for one maybe an activity for others. If you want to get strong enough to pick up your 35 pound grandson, should you lift 10 pounds 15 times or should you start lift 15 pounds 10 times then 20 pounds 10 times and so on until 35 pounds is relatively easy?
Physical activity is any task set in motion to maintain current ability. If you walk one-mile everyday at the same pace year after year that is an activity. You are not trying to make a change you are basically trying to stay the same. Let say you start doing a Zumba class and the next couple days after the first class your body felt sore like it exercised. Now, two months later you do your Zumba class and the once you get done you didn’t feel that same feeling the day after. Zumba is now turning into an activity for you. This is great for all of you that have the body and feel the way you want. If you are not satisfied with your body and still want changes you will need to find new challenges to change your body. This does not mean you need to stop Zumba especially if you like it just means adding new challenging exercise routing to keep your body changing. This could a different class or I always encourage weights training because most of us need to have more strength.
So, exercise in not important for life but we can use it to make changes and enhance our life. Once we achieve those changes then we continue our activities to enjoy our life.
Checkout this video I did in Mexico exercise and what you need to do to hit your goals: https://www.facebook.com/schaffermethod/videos/2893150750900881/