Hey!
It’s been a little while since I last wrote anything. It’s been an incredibly busy time at Revive PT Eltham with a lot of new faces coming through the doors, and trusting their health and fitness to us. Thankfully, we have had the opportunity to help so many more people to achieve results and to focus on themselves again, especially within our mums and bubs classes.
But, for this article, I wanted to touch on a few different topics that have come up over the past 48 hours with a few members.
The first topic I wanted to discuss is ‘Why We Do What We Do’, and why it’s so important to keep doing it.
Now when it comes to this topic, people often go one of 2 ways. They do everything they can to support and encourage physical change, or they self sabotage their efforts because of an in built ‘fear’ to continue and to maintain this new lifestyle they thought for sure was what they actually wanted from the beginning.
For those of us who don’t have much variation in our lifestyles when it comes to training and nutrition, it’s easy, because it’s now habit that allows us to continue doing it. If you’re not quite there yet, it may just take a bit more persistence and dedication before your new habits are cemented in place and they become natural.
For most people who start training from a young age, we often continue because we want to stay fit and healthy, continue to look good, and to become the best version of ourselves that we can. For others who take it up later on in life, it’s important to find out why you’re doing it, and here are some of the main reasons why you should.
Weight training and physical exercise helps to strengthen your heart and lungs, along with the rest of your cardiovascular system and respiratory system. Working out your heart, which is in a sense, a muscle, allows it to get stronger and perform more efficiently, taking a lot of stress off it over the next few decades. By placing physical demand on our lungs, they respond by becoming stronger and work more efficiently at performing on a day-to-day basis.
Weight training is also the best thing you can be doing for your muscles and bones. There is countless studies out there that prove that lifting weights is the best way to keep your muscles and bones strong.
In one study, postmenopausal women who participated in a strength training program for a year saw significant increases in their bone density in the spine and hips, areas affected most by osteoporosis in older women.
- https://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/features/weight-training#1
As the years go by, our focus shifts from wanting to look good, to wanting to feel good. You may not be at this stage yet, or you might be, but I can guarantee this, you will always reach this point. You reach a point when lifting weights and exercising becomes more about quality of life than looking your best in a bikini… although looking good on the beach is often a positive side effect of lifting weights.
"We lose so much muscle as we age that by the time we're 70, we only have about 50% to 55% of our muscle mass left," says Beatrice Edwards, MD, MPH, associate professor of medicine and director of the Bone Health and Osteoporosis Center at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. "That explains why we feel weak and tired as we age, and we can prevent some of that with weight training."
- https://www.webmd.com/osteoporosis/features/weight-training#1
As you can see, as we age, it becomes harder to maintain, and especially build, muscle mass, so it’s what we do right now that will have the greatest impact on our future. It’s never too late to start, always remember that. We’ve had members start training with us in their 60’s.
Often you can compare a group of friends at the same age, and you can visibly see the kind of care they take when it comes to their body.
Are they in shape?
Do they look younger than the others?
Do they have that “spring” in their step?
Do they still love exercising and moving?
Do things seem easier for them?
All of these questions will tell you just how much love and care that person has given themselves over the years. They often don’t realise it, or use a long list of excuses why someone else has it and they don’t. Don’t be one of those people who thinks that the person with the better body is because of their genetics. It’s not. They likely just train harder, or simply train, eat better, are more active and are therefore happier with less stress.
Another positive part of exercising is the mental health side of it.
Studies prove time and time again, that when we exercise, our body releases serotonin, our feel good hormone.
First, motor activity increases the rate and frequency at which serotonin is "fired" within the brain, resulting in an increase in both the release and synthesis of it. Secondly, regular exercise increases the level of tryptophan in the brain (an amino acid used to manufacture serotonin). - https://www.livestrong.com/article/551906-my-anxiety-gets-worse-during-exercise/