Why Don't We Exercise More?

Lack of exercise is critical as a factor in heart disease and how important increasing exercise can be in helping lower the likelihood of heart disease impacting your life.

We cannot move on without talking about the obvious. If exercise is so good for your heart and your body in so many different ways, why doesn’t everyone exercise like mad?  The truth is that people do not like to exercise. It is not because they are lazy, but because exercise has actually been evolutionarily selected against. Huh?

Think about it. All our behavior today actually stem from the physiology and biochemistry that we inherited from our cave dwelling ancestors. In long past days, obtaining enough food to live was very difficult. Life for our ancestors was actually pretty mundane. They hunted, ate and conserved fuel so they could live another day. The hunting process gave them the exercise they needed to remain healthy during the thirty-some years that they lived. Expending extra energy would have been counterproductive both from a conservation of energy standpoint and an interaction with a hostile environment standpoint. It would have been selected against evolutionary.

Today, things are different, of course. We have comfortable, plush gyms and wonderful running shoes.  We have extra time and our hunting is done in the meat case of the local grocery store.  We over-eat food fuels and have more than enough energy stores to complete a daily exercise program. Nonetheless, these are very recent changes in the entire history of mankind and the gene software running our physiology is still sending “don’t exercise” signals out to the body. When we understand this, then we have a chance to overcome it.

People always ask, what is the best exercise? We always tell them the same thing, “whatever activity you like to do and you can engage in consistently for 30 minutes or more.”  That is the rule of thumb.  Whether you like walking, swimming, jogging, lifting weights, biking, playing tennis – it really doesn’t matter.  What matters is that you LIKE doing it and that by itself will overcome the genetic program that exists in you to keep you from exercising.  I even took it one step further and created j20 concept, JUST 20 minutes. This was the last stop to help you realize how quickly time passes by.

Always remember, your cave people ancestors didn’t last much past 30 and they didn’t have much opportunity to develop heart disease, high blood pressure or runaway triglycerides. They succumbed as victims of a hostile environment or died of one of many rampart pathogens. They didn’t need to exercise for health but YOU DO.  Modern science has doubled to tripled your ancestors life span and has given you hourly access to negative health robbing tools such as high fructose corn syrup and trans fatty acids.

One significant way you can positively impact on your health and lower your risk of heart disease is to get off your best intentions and stay active!

If you are overweight and do not exercise, and are in the at risk age group for heart disease, you are playing Russian Roulette with your health. If you have a history of heart disease in your family as well, then you can pretty well figure out what chamber the bullet is located in – the very next one.

Get active, lose those first ten pounds and give your heart a new lease on life.