Is exercise BAD for you?
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Is exercise BAD for you?
by John Bandy, D.C.
Regular exercise – it gives us fitness to complete difficult tasks, is great recreation, helps regulate depression and anxiety, is good for our self-esteem, makes us more attractive, and gets us out of the house.
Fact is, though, exercise works because it’s bad for you.
When you exercise, your body’s so stressed that it responds by making all sorts of adaptive changes that protect you from killing yourself – literally. We call the sum total of these adaptations fitness. Bodies can only handle so much stress at one time, though. Add more, and you’ll “break” instead of adapting successfully.
You can run, but you can’t hide.
Believing exercise alone is good for you can lead to bad decisions. “I can eat candy bars all day because I exercise and that keeps me healthy.” Wrong. You’re not healthy – you’re just fit. Jim Fix, author of The Complete Book of Running, honestly believed that running would protect him from negative effects of smoking. He died of a heart attack at a very young age.
If you understand exercise can be bad for you, you’ll have more respect for it, and:
- Balance the desire to achieve a specific result with the desire to protect your health.
- Realize you need to eat better, sleep more, and hydrate more then the average person.
- Make an honest evaluation of your fitness. Many people can run marathons on just a little training and finish, but at costs ranging from colds and flu to knee surgeries and lots of chiropractic. Remember, Phidipides – who ran that first twenty-six miles from Marathon to Athens – died.
The most important thing you can do to become the strongest, most talented athlete you can is stay healthy long enough to reach your goal. The point of calling exercise bad for you is to get you to argue, rationalize, scream, holler, and think – and manage the stress involved, in a way that allows you to maintain your health and enjoy the sports you love.
Dr. John Bandy is a chiropractor, and a founder and director of Austin Holistic Health, a multi-practitioner natural health center in Westlake. (512) 328-4041 www.AutinHolisticHealth.com
