It is important to do at least 30 minutes of exercise each day. This is one of the best ways you can improve your circulation, which helps with ensuring nutrients and oxygen throughout your body. It is also very important to help with detoxifying the body as good circulation ensures that the waste materials that your body produces is removed efficiently.
Other benefits of regular exercise include:
- improving mood, especially the release of nervous tension and irritations from the day
- maintaining healthy blood sugar levels and reducing the risk of developing diabetes
- improving cardiovascular health and reducing the risk of chronic heart disease
- strength training (eg. weights, push ups) also helps to encourage the development of strong bones
The options for what sort of exercise you can do are almost limitless. In the end, what is most important is to work out what works for you. The best way to ensure that you keep getting regular exercise is if you find something you enjoy doing. For example, if the thought of going to the gym repulses you, then this is probably not the best fit for you. But there are so many options and it is of such importance to ongoing good health that it is really worth experimenting to find something that you enjoy.
One of the best ways to ensure you get the exercise each day is to find a time in the day that it best suits you and do the exercise at that same time each day. After a few weeks of working hard to stick to the routine then it becomes much more normalised and you don’t have to work so hard at it.
A brief inexhaustive list of exercise options:
- Brisk walk (brisk enough to get your heart rate up)
- Bike riding
- Going to the gym (if you’ve never been before, many gyms will have a staff who can help you develop a program that suits your level of fitness and experience)
- Tai chi
- Yoga
- Martial arts
- Team sports
- Swimming
- Bushwalking
- Dancing
- Kayaking or other water sports
If you are dealing with a chronic health imbalance (eg. heart condition, diabetes), it is important to discuss your exercise options with your medical practitioner. You can also ask your GP about a referral to an exercise program, where you can access personal support to find a way of exercising that will suit you.
Fuelling your exercise
Beyond ensuring daily exercise, there are some other health and nutritional considerations in relation to developing physical fitness. The first thing to remember is that physical exercise and exertion creates a stress on your body. So ensuring a balanced approach to exercise is as important as any other aspect of managing your health. There are three aspects to fitness: cardio fitness, strength and flexibility. All three aspects are necessary to find a healthful balance. There can be too much of a good thing and it is important to listen to your body. If your exercise regime is leaving you sore and tired continually, then your body is telling you that something is out of balance. It may be that you are working too hard, not stretching enough or it may be that you are not fuelling your exercise adequately.
In regards to fuelling your exercise and developing fitness, the nutritional considerations are the same as for day-to-day life. You cannot fuel healthful activity on the poisoned foods promoted by the dominant fast “food” culture. There is a popular conception that doing exercise reduces the need to eat well. Nothing could be further from the truth. Exercise increases the demand on our bodies, it increases the need for good nutrition!
Intensive exercise increases the demand our bodies have for many important nutrients that we cannot get from poison food and bubblegum drinks. There is big money involved in sports nutrition and marketing: which is geared toward quick and easy (and usually expensive) solutions which have more to do with short term gains than any genuine nutritional knowledge. A lot of products marketed for sports nutrition are packed with nasty fillers and stimulants which give the sense that they are giving you more energy. It is a very short term solution that will contribute significantly to depleting your body of nutrients and burning out the very systems that you need to develop your energy production mechanisms and thus your fitness.
There is also an increasing abuse of herbal medicines to enhance fitness performance. Just because something is “herbal” or “natural” does not make it good for you. Using herbal stimulants or “adaptogens” to enhance physical and mental performance is a nasty short cut that will leave you depleted and unbalanced in the long term.