Integrating "Exercise" Into Your Daily Living (Activities)

What makes "exercise" so problematical for many people, is that it is required by those who instruct it, to be something apart from their normal daily activities -- rather than as it naturally should be, that which improves one's normal daily activities. If they don't, then they don't have a lot of meaning or rationale for doing it -- other than to detract from the doing and enjoyment of one's normal (preferred) activities, and to make one miserable in the backwards thinking that the reason for doing anything, is because "it feels so good when you stop." A rational and intelligent person might then ask, "Why then, begin them at all?"

In this manner of thinking, exercise hasn't come a very long way from the days of the gladiator, in which it was said, "What doesn't kill you, will make you stronger." So one had no choice but to get stronger -- or be killed. A lot of people still use that kind of primitive psychology, motivation and reasoning -- as the hallmark of their conditioning activities (exercise) -- that if one doesn't lift the 500 lbs, it will crush them -- or if you don't batter your opponent senseless, they will do it to you -- as though that was some kind of perfectly good logic.

Every Saturday night, all across the world, some person will lose their life proving to everyone else that they are "better" than those they think they are competing against, to prove their fitness and superiority to those who are similarly impaired and impressed. It may be in showing how fast they can drive a course in that impaired state of mind and capacities -- while taking the greatest risks or even being completely oblivious to all of them.

The common feature of all those things, is that they are not the normal activities of daily living -- but activities decidedly not in the normal course of their living, so there is no way for them to get better at what they practice all the time. It unfortunately turns out to be a "one shot deal," in which if they were familiar with it, they would not be susceptible to grievous error and misjudgment.

Instead, one would approach it like an accountant who knows that "2 + 2 is going to be equal to 4 every time," -- and not that the sky is the limit because they've never done 2 + 2 before -- or while high, or impaired. Such people are addicted to living dangerously -- and out of control, fancying that that is what real living is about -- and not all that daily stuff, they could do better, much more meaningfully and productively.

It should be no secret to anybody that life now is much more sedentary than it was in primitive days when people needed to devote most of their waking lives to providing for a meager sustenance for themselves. And we should rightfully think that such a life now is better for it rather than the thinking of an invariable few that those old days and ways were so much better because the few people who did live then, were healthier -- because they had to be during their brief and hard lives.

But is simply making life hard again, what makes people healthier, or is that a non factor that invariably shortens and increases injury and death -- but we only show the pictures of those who are still alive? And conversely, much of what we know of "old sick people," is that those are the people the health care organizations "see all the time," and never those who never need to see them -- who might as well not exist -- for all practical purposes, because they are so exceptional.

But the exceptional, is where we should be heading, and not the normal -- in discussions and programming for exceptional good health, and not the normal that keeps such patients returning regularly -- as though that is now the new normal. Thus the right question is not how we can get people to give up their preferred sedentary activities, but how to make them healthful ones -- rather than requiring people to stand on their feet all day, or run around all day in the misguided notion that that will make everyone Olympic champions rather than more accurately, that will cripple even Olympic champions if they had to endure lives of such demanding and crushing workloads.

The lion is king not because it is leading every hunt and misadventure, but arrives in time, when the hunt is concluded.