It seems strange that we make time and spend money on things to make ourselves happy and to be able to live our life in a more comfortable fashion yet often do not make allowances for time and resources to take care of our bodies. Houses, property, cars, overseas trips, new clothes and electronic ‘toys’ all seem so important in our modern day lives. But where does the health of our body fit in to all of this?
Most often nowhere and this is evident in the fact that six out of ten adults do not do enough proper exercise to keep themselves strong and therefore healthy. Most people do not fully understand how important the muscular system is of the human body which makes up roughly 50 percent of its weight. Muscle cells are metabolically highly active and their health dictates the overall health of their body.
If the muscular system is allowed to grow weak with not enough muscle building and maintaining activity it will set the body into a downward spiral of declining health that can at best guarantee a lower quality of life and at worst instigate an early exit from this world. You would think we all would want to protect ourselves from this wouldn’t you?
Our modern day lives do not any longer have enough muscular ‘work’ in them to stimulate the ‘growth and repair’ hormones that renew and replace old worn out cells and tissues. So unless we take it upon ourselves to replace this work with intentional proper exercise we get chemicals whispering to the cells to decay, deteriorate and die.
An adult will lose 15-25 pounds of muscle tissue as they get older and this is what siphons the life force from us. Not the years or aging but the loss of this precious muscle tissue which is in fact our body’s engine. We start off with a V-8 and if we do nothing to protect and look after it with proper exercise it will end up with the power of a motor scooter.
So many people view proper exercise as something ‘optional’, a luxury or something they do if they have time left over. What is the point of having flash cars, houses and clothes if your body is aging at a premature and accelerated rate, and it will be if you are not taking care of business – your strength?
Do not fall into the trap that walking or some other low intensity recreational type activity is enough as it is not. These types of activity will not even keep your strength and will certainly not rebuild lost strength. You have to do more than that. You have to do a couple of sessions each week of proper exercise – strength training exercise that works your muscles through their ranges of movement under a load.
Currently, when the average male turns 65, he can expect to live an additional 11 years and a female, at 65, can expect to live another 20 years and it depends of what you do in the years and decades before this happens as to what state your health when is you get there. Whether you enjoy these years fully active and healthy or dragged down with disease and disability is a choice – make the right one.
