[The importance of exercise for a longer, healthier life.]

Have you ever followed a driver put-putting along very slowly – you can tell they always do, barely ever getting the engine over 2,000 RPMs – and notice that their car is giving off a lot of emissions? It makes you want to get in that car and take it out on the interstate to rev it up for a good “clean out.” Strange analogy perhaps, but almost a perfect match to what happens to a sedentary person’s body. It accumulates waste, and becomes very inefficient at burning fuel. But take it out for a “run” and voilà! – it starts to clean itself out!

The more your body moves, the more your blood flows. The more your blood flows, the more nutrients can be delivered to individual cells, and the more waste removed. In addition, the more you move, the more you create the need on a cellular level for energy, so more of the food you eat gets used instead of stored as body fat.

Let’s go back to the car analogy. Suppose you have a car that you want to preserve and you put-put around in it so as to not wear it out. In actuality, you are not doing the car any good, because the engine will accumulate by-products of combustion, but will not be able to discharge them because you never “rev it up.” Old-timers may be familiar with the phrase “blowing out the carbon” as it refers to racing the car’s engine to clean it out (within the speed limit of course!).

On a more scientific note, the medical profession is well aware of the amount of atrophy (muscle loss) that is incurred during limb (a cast) or whole body (bed-ridden) immobilization. We all, unfortunately, have heard of the too common scenario of an elderly person breaking their hip from a fall and succumbing to the surgery afterward. As they lie in bed their muscles and immune system deteriorate at an alarming rate, and their body finally reaches a point where it cannot fight off the normal infections that we contact every day… and so loses the battle.

This is actually what is happening to everyone, right now. After adolescence we are all on a track to expire, and the most prevalent indicator of this is muscle loss. The variable you are in control of is the rate at which it is happening. Just like your car, if your body is not running well, it is because you decided not to tune it up. Millions of people choose not to get involved with the issue of health and fitness and block it out. Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. As the distinguished Neil Peart, lyricist/drummer of RUSH states in one of their most popular songs, “If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice.”

We now realize that it is important for the body to be placed under a certain level of stress regularly. In fact, one of the primary obstacles to inhabiting outer space is the lack of gravity. The gravity that is pulling on your bones as you read this article, the gravity you are not even feeling or thinking about, is keeping your bones stressed and, therefore, creating new cells and staying firm. Without gravity, astronauts lose bone mass at an alarming rate. Even with gravity, we now know that without any additional resistance, gravity is not quite enough and bone loss is becoming a real problem. It all comes down to the fact that we are part of a system billions of years old and so complex that we have not even scratched the surface of knowledge. One thing is for sure – mess with nature and you will lose.

Virtually everyone knows of the importance of muscle for weight management and overall health nowadays. Unfortunately, gravity (alone) works even less for muscles than it does for bone, and without resistance training, or an occupation or hobby that takes its place, your muscles will deteriorate as middle age sets in… kind of like snow melting on a warm day. As the muscle goes away, so does your metabolism and immune system. Not a situation you want to find yourself in.

Remember that when you start weight training you may gain a few pounds. That is your muscles adapting, so don’t be alarmed, and don’t stop! That slight water weight is your muscles preparing to raise your metabolism. This is also why many people stay the same weight but their clothes get loose. They are losing fat and building healthy muscle. Their weight remains constant because the fat weight is being replaced by lean muscle weight. Never let this scenario stop you from weight training!

Lastly, while most people need more weight training than they are currently doing, consistency is the most important variable. For most people, a half hour three or four times a week (plus stretch time) will work if the time is well spent – and that’s a big “if”. If you’re not using those muscles, the time to start is now. You are not going to wake up one day and say to yourself, “Gee, I sure have a lot of extra time lately; I guess I’ll go lift some weights now.” You go to work because you have to, you go to the bathroom because you have to, and you put clothes on before you leave the house because you have to. If you don’t approach exercise with the same philosophy, you are likely to find yourself wishing you could turn back the clock and rearrange your priorities.

Darin Loccarini is a certified personal trainer at Lifestyle Family Fitness in Northeast St. Petersburg. He has nearly a decade of fitness industry experience and is certified through the National Academy of Sports Medicine and APEX Fitness Systems. (727) 798-5566.