Fitting Fitness Into Your Life

On a message board that I frequent, one of the contributors brought up a very interesting point: the people who talk about wanting to get fit but "not having time for it," or "not being able to fit it into their busy schedule" are going about this all wrong.

Fitness is not just a process of trying to look good and lose weight. It is a process of life improvement. To truly get fit is not just hitting the weights once in a while or going to the gym to stare blindly at the TV screens while trudging on a treadmill, but actually taking steps to make yourself healthy inside and out. It includes lifestyle changes like diet improvements, regular full-body exercise, and goal-setting.

By full-body exercise, I don't just mean making sure you hit all your major muscle groups with weight routines, or doing the Nordic Trak because it hits all your muscle groups at once. I mean getting down and doing some very basic bodyweight exercises - nothing that isolates a muscle group, but rather working your body as a system from top to bottom. And I also mean exercises that hit not only your muscles, but those that massage the organs and increase the flow of oxygen into and out of the body. And most importantly, exercise that makes you wake up and take notice of what your body's real condition is.

People who listen to music or watch TV while exercising are on the wrong track. You don't want to try to distract yourself from your body while exercising, you want to pay MORE attention to it. You should be feeling every single breath that comes into your lungs, and feel every single muscle that expands or contracts as you go through the motions of the routine. If something doesn't feel right, work it till it does. Or go to the doctor to find out why it feels wrong if it's REALLY wrong.

I see infomercials with those silly ab exercisers that isolate your abs so that you don't hurt your neck while doing situps, and think "that's ridiculous. If your neck is sore from doing situps, then your neck is weak and you need to exercise that part of your body too."

But I'm getting off an a bad tangent here. The most important thing of all to keep in mind about exercise is that you shouldn't be trying to fit it into your life. You should be trying to fit the rest of your life around your health. If you aren't healthy, then the rest of your life doesn't mean jack. If I'm not healthy, I'm no good to my family, no good to my employer, no good to my friends.

And most importantly I'm no good to myself.

So the next time you think "I don't have time to exercise," turn that around and think "how can I fit my life around my health?"