USE IT OR LOSE IT – OR, WE LOVE IT WHEN SCIENCE ‘CATCHES UP’ TO WHAT WE ALREADY KNOW!
I can’t begin to count how many times I’ve heard people say “I’m too tired to exercise,” and when I tell them that’s all the more reason they should exercise, that they will actually create energy by expending it, they look at me like I’m crazy. Now, admittedly my mental state may be at times in question, but the statement that exercise fights fatigue and creates energy is a fact, not just my opinion.
So it was with a degree of interest – and hope – that I saw a recent headline
in the Atlanta Journal Constitution that proclaimed “Need energy? Exercise 20 minutes, experts say”.
The article, by Bill Hendrick, read in part: “No matter how tired you feel after work when you go home to face the kids, just 20 minutes of mild exercise before you get there will give you enough of an energy boost to deal with them, according to scientists at the University of Georgia.
It’s the same when dawn breaks and work beckons, says Professor Patrick O’Connor, co-director of the UGA exercise psychology laboratory. Take a 20 minute walk, and you’ll be better ready to tackle the day.”
The article went on to relate that in a study published in the November issue of the journal “Psychological Bulletin”, O’Connor, kinesiology Professor Rod Dishman and Tim Puetz, analyzed 70 randomized, controlled trials involving 6807 people (the number of trials and participates indicates a widespread sampling). The results: they found “that exercise increased energy and reduced fatigue by about 20 percent”.
It is interesting to note that the study showed that the positive effects showed up in almost all participants, including cancer victims, diabetics, and people with heart disease, chronic fatigue syndrome and depression.
Also of note, in one of the studies a control group took modafinil, a medication used to treat fatigue, but this group experienced only a small benefit.
“The exercise worked better than the pill,” Professor O’Connor said.
Wow! Better than a pill!
Still, the idea that exercise can increase energy and decrease fatigue – instead of the other way around – evidently seems illogical to a lot of people, possibly
because they are unaware of certain basics of human physiology, possibly because they haven’t tried it, probably because they simply don’t want to expend the effort.
But let’s set aside normal human inclinations to take the easy road and to hear (believe) only what we want to hear, and look at some facts in order to shed light on the facts behind this seeming contradiction.
First, among its many other benefits exercise increases circulation and respiration and releases energy promoting and mood enhancing neurotransmitters in the brain, resulting in the so called ‘exercise high’.
Second, the body is a marvelously adaptive organism. Exercise physiologists have a term “SAID” or “Specific Adaptation To Imposed Demands”, which essentially states that when demands, or stresses, are placed upon the body, the body adapts to these demands. Simply put, if you exercise by training with weights, running, stretching, etc. your body adapts by becoming stronger, more enduring, faster, more flexible and so forth. Conversely, if you lay in bed for a protracted period of time, your body atrophies; the muscles grow smaller and weaker, heart, lung and other organ function declines, even connective tissue degrades, so that after a while you’ll find it hard to even stand up.
Lay around or sit on a couch and eat junk food and you’ll be training yourself to look and feel like someone who sits on a couch and eats junk food! Human physiology is basically the same as it was a decade ago, a century ago, a millennium ago. The human body needs to move – or waste away and age, or even die, prematurely.
In plain language: Use It Or Lose It!
And it’s not just us at Natural Champion saying so; it’s a whole body of scientific research…its years of empirical observation…it’s just plain common sense!
So, the next time you hear someone say they’re too tired to exercise you can tell them that their tiredness just may be a sure sign that they need exactly what they’re avoiding. And hope, for their sake, the sake of our upcoming generation of already overweight children, and the sake of our increasingly strained medical community and Medicaid, Medicare and other federal and state aid programs, that that person listens.
