Exercise as Medicine

By Keoni Teta

There is no doubt that exercise is the most powerful medicine. Well, OK, the other lifestyle medicines like: sleep and nutrition rank up there too, but in this blog I will focus on exercise. There is so much research on the benefits of exercise for anxiety, depression, insomnia, osteoporosis, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, etc. Most diseases will benefit from exercise.

Imagine a pill that has all the medicinal benefits of exercise. Drug companies would be put out of business if there was such a thing as an exercise pill. Unlike a pharmaceutical drug that has numerous negative side-effects and tends to suppress your body's natural healing mechanisms, exercise has numerous positive side effects and works with the bodies natural healing mechanisms.

The fact, according to research, that exercise is medicine means exercise not only prevents disease, it also treats disease. Exercise as medicine also means that it has the potential to be a poison. The really cool thing about exercise being medicine is that its therapeutic window is huge. In other words, a large therapeutic window for exercise means most people will benefit from it to some extent no matter how they do it or for how long.

With that being said, exercise as it is done today by most people is not sustainable in the long run. People are getting a poisonous dose if they are exercising at moderate or high intensities for more than 30-40 minutes at a time everyday. An example, of this is going out for a jog everyday or every other day for 5-10 miles. Overtime this will lead to a tremendous amount of physical stress on the body. Exercising like this will cause joint problems, depression, accelerated aging, and lots of emotional stress.

We have all heard of the person that runs everyday and has been doing it for years and then suddenly drops dead of a heart attack. Could this have been avoided if they exercise appropriately? I believe so. Exercise is a form stress... too much stress will kill you; the right amount will make you stronger and healthier. The American mentality of "more is better" when it comes to exercise is potentially dangerous. Another, example of exercise as poison is the person that is sedentary and than all of a sudden overly exerts themselves by shoveling snow out of driveway on the first big snow of the winter, or a sedentary person late for a plane running down the terminal to catch it. If your body is not trained for an event like this, it could kill you.

So the question is how should people exercise to get the all the benefits of it? I tell all my clients to exercise in a way that will make your ancient ancestors proud. Learn from them. I know this sounds kind of funny, but it is true. Our ancestors lived a lifestyle that incorporated exercise into it. In fact, to our ancestors there wasn't any such thing as exercise. Their exercise consisted of foraging for food, building shelters, hunting, and running like hell to avoid being eaten. Most of their movement consisted of walking. Their higher intensity movement only lasted for short intervals, usually no longer than a minute at a time. It is interesting to note that most sports like football, baseball, and basketball consist of short bursts of high activity followed by rest. These sports mimic, in a sense, how our ancestors moved/exercised.

If you are sedentary you should acclimate into any exercise routine. Do a little at time, but stay consistent. So, if you are doing a Metabolic Effect workout you should push yourself hard for very short bursts, maybe 5-20 secs, until you reach slight discomfort either cardiovascularly, or you feel a mild muscle burn. Once you reach this point rest, and rest completely. Let your body recover and then do it again. Maybe the first time you do the workout you only exercise for a total of 5 minutes in the whole 30 minutes of the workout. This is exactly the way it should be done. The next time you do it you will be able to add more bursts of exercise within the exercise session. In essence, you are slowly creating a more dense workout. If you exercise like this, "push hard and rest hard" you will get all the medicinal benefits of exercise. In other words, you will have gotten your anti-depressant for the day, your energy pill, your sleeping pill, your bone-building pill, your viagra pill, your fat-burning pill, your cardio-protective pill, and you blood-sugar lowering pill.

Exercise is cheap insurance, really the only cost is time...and calories, which most of us need to burn anyway. Appropriate exercise or medicinal exercise/Metabolic Effect does not take a lot of time. Appropriate exercise is a medicine that is cheap, non-invasive, doesn't take a lot of time, and has many many beneficial side-effects.