Dancing: A Way to Keep Body Fit
This is very interesting. Dancing is mentioned several times as a great way of getting exercise without actually feeling like you are exercising. It’s a shame that dancing (especially partner dancing) is so difficult to do everywhere in our Western society where there is live music and is universally associated with alcohol consumption.
People will willingly pay to go and walk on a treadmill but not pay to learn to dance or to enjoy dancing to live music. How did we get here, and how do we change this? Go out and learn to dance for heaven’s sake; it’s a lot more fun than running, that’s for sure.
For quality living, mobility, and autonomy, I agree that it’s a 1:1, and no matter what, exercise is good for health. However, fitness isn’t a precise predictor of longevity itself when you’re not doing statistics on the population but looking at individuals. It’s a little like BMI. Look around yourself and your own family and friends, and the people who lived to 100 weren’t necessarily impressively fit, just decently active and lively. But for quality of life and plenty of other reasons, definitely keep moving!
Doctors want us to exercise and keep active as we get older. Advice has often been based on a minimum to achieve a particular level of health. things like “half an hour a day of moderate exercise or “get out of breath for 20 minutes twice a week.” In my view, there are two problems with this. One is that it faces the same problems as a calorie-restricted diet in reverse.
It is imposed on yourself, so it becomes a barrier you keep failing to overcome. Secondly, fitness works like the gearbox on a car. The engine struggles in higher gear if the speed isn’t high enough. Our body struggles in higher gear if the endurance isn’t there.
That’s why we need to find fun. We will always continue a little longer with something that is fun. We are also different in how fitness fades. If I exercise well once or twice a week, fitness feels like something that will fade quickly if I miss a few sessions. If I achieve 3, 4, or more, fitness becomes the norm rather than something I am on the verge of losing. Psychology is complex; conquering your own psychology is part of keeping fit and making it easy.
Fitness Secret From Ancestor’s Lifestyle
The other day, I was thinking about us making constant comparisons with our ancestors and trying to mimic their lifestyle. I was walking fast, voluntarily, just to sort of stretch my legs and pump up my blood after sitting down for a couple of hours at a conference. I was thinking about our ancestors and said to myself, I bet they weren’t exercising. They must have been physically active when needed, i.e., for getting food or running away from something dangerous. But their lives were different.
They didn’t have deliveries; they didn’t have homes outside of wildness. They didn’t have a comfortable life. They were likely preserving energy rather than using it without a purpose. It seems like my intuition on this was right, as this video confirms it. We now need to compensate for all the sitting and comfort that we’ve built for ourselves. And we should also bear in mind that our ancestors didn’t live as long as we do now, so staying active in old age is extremely important.
Active travel is a great way to build exercise into daily routines. Leaving the car at home and walking and cycling instead of using the car works for me. Even using public transport is more active than driving, as it involves some walking. Good for the planet and good for us.
Important stuff, It’s interesting, though, to ignore simple lifestyle changes that we in the US could make as a culture that would be good for our health. More mass transit and bike-friendly cities make it so more people cannot have a car, which means more people move. Using the floor more to sit keeps you going up and down more.
Signs on elevators asking that people don’t need to use them if they don’t need to and making stairways in commercial buildings easy to find and nice to use (like windows in them) There are tons of design choices we could make to make our built world healthier for us, and most of them save money in the long run and are better for our earth’s health as well.