Move Your Body
Exercises is our most needed activity, and the least practiced. That’s because most people think they don’t have the time or energy to do it. Often, this is the result of poor diet and lifestyle choices.
Exercise is crucial to health, and its practically impossible to stay healthy without regular exercise. This doesn’t mean that we need to run marathons, or take daily CrossFit classes to be healthy.
There are countless activities that can serve as exercise, including walking, yoga, qi-gong, dancing, running, hiking, cycling, and almost every sport. Some of these activities are better than others. For example, swimming is a healthier form of exercise than golfing.
Most doctors recommend people to exercise 30 minutes a day. This is not enough for optimal health, but doctors recommend only 30 minutes, because they know most people won’t even consider doing more. The truth is that if doctors told their patients to exercise for two hours a day, most of their clients wouldn’t even do it for a minute.
Recent studies on the needs and benefits of exercise have concluded that humans need at least two hours of daily exercise to function at their best. The more exercise we do, the healthier we will be, until we reach a point of marginal diminishing returns. We just need to make sure the exercise we do is good for us, and that we can stop when our bodies had enough.
We must remember that some exercises build us up, and others can break us down. It is also very important to do any exercise correctly.
Yoga is a great example because some types of yoga, when done correctly, can be perfectly healthy, even if practiced for more than two hours per day. These type of exercises are completely safe and have few negative effects, pranayama would be the perfect example. On the other hand, there are many forms of yoga that can be unhealthy when overdone or done incorrectly, hot yoga, and yoga with weights, fall into this category.
Living a sedentary lifestyle is new for humans. The first sedentary societies appeared between 25,000 and 17,000 BC. (1) As time passed, humans became more sedentary. In present times people have sedentary homes, sedentary jobs, and sedentary forms of entertainment.
Even the most active and “nomadic” among us stand or sit for most of the day, and only spend a couple of hours moving our bodies consciously. Our human vessel is capable of much more than that, and needs more than that to function better. We can be at our best when our bodies are trained daily, and challenged to improve.
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Acknowledgments
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Source:
(1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sedentism