Introduction

Instincts don't always get it right in what's best for us. Our instincts were honed over generations without the context of the next cycle it will run. Running from fears, social rituals, cravings, and how we understand our resources have all evolved at a cellular level like muscle memory and it's our job to write our new chapters. With the context of safety, community, access and work charting a variety of courses, are our needs being misinterpreting north for south?

What We Already Know About Exercise Repeated One More Time

It is well known that exercise is an important part of maintaining wellness. It's hard to find anyone who doesn't understand this, but only about 20% of Americans meet the physical activity guidelines that scientists believe we need to maintain health.¹ The following guidelines define the physical activity that is recommended for adults each week.²

The Guidelines

Option One to Meet Exercise Guidelines:

• 2.5 hours of moderate intensity exercise each week
• AND at least two sessions per week of weight training that work all major muscle groups (legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms)
• Moderate intensity includes an perceived increase in breathing and heart rate
• Moderate activity accrues health benefits if it is conducted in bursts as short at 10 minutes of duration (but not in bursts shorter than 10 minutes)
• Activities of daily living cannot be counted in this total unless the activity includes a perceived increase in breathing and heart rate and lasts at least 10 minutes.
• Examples of Moderate Intensity activity: fast walking, water aerobics, doubles tennis, cycling on a flat road with small hills, pushing a lawn mower, shoveling snow

Option Two to meet Exercise Guidelines:

• 1.25 hours of vigorous intensity exercise each week
• AND at least two sessions per week of weight training that work all major muscle groups (legs, hips, back, abdomen, chest, shoulders, and arms)
• During vigorous activity, it's hard to say a long sentence without pausing for breath
• Examples of Vigorous intensity activities: Singles tennis, step aerobics, swimming laps, jogging, cycling on fast or on hills

But I Just Don't Feel Like Exercising

Research shows that people who don't exercise feel less inclined to exercise. There may be a good reason for this. People who don't exercise store more energy as fat in their abdominal body cavity (around the organs). Historically, humans have lived during a time when we had too few calories, not too many. The stored fat in our body told our system that we had enough food, that we'd found a nice, relatively stress free place to live with surplus food supply. Stored abdominal fat, during times of scarcity, told us not to jeopardize this condition by going too far afield where we might run into predators, famine or drought conditions.

Couch Potatoes and Lean Beans

The opposite case held true as well. Historically, when people had little intra-abdominal stored fat, it signaled that the body was under stress and should search for better living conditions and better access to food.

Thus, stored fat meant "stay sedentary in your safe place," while lack of fat meant, "go out, get active and keep looking... you are NOT in a safe place".

This metabolic instinct to stay put when we carry extra weight, helped us during times of scarcity, but harms us now, during times of abundance. But our bodies have not adapted to living during times of abundance yet.

Chronic Inflammation

Another way that stored fat works against us when it comes to motivation for exercise is through chronic inflammation. When cells that store extra energy (fat cells) are over-stretched due to energy overload, they send out a distress signal. The distress signal triggers an attempt to heal the cell through the natural healing response, though there isn't much the body can do to help. This repeated call for help and the repeated attempt to heal is called chronic inflammation. Scientists believe that chronic inflammation sends a signal to the body to "rest and relax" so that healing can take place. This compels the very people who most need to exercise, not to do so.³

Coercion is the Answer

People who aren't regular exercisers have an uphill battle to become regular exercisers and to stay regular exercisers. The theories presented above explain why motivation is so hard to come by when inactivity and a few extra inches sneak up around the tummy.

The good news is that we don't have to feel so bad about our lack of willpower. When we fail to initiate an exercise routine, it's also our human biology kicking in, a leftover vestige from living during times of scarcity.

The bad news is that those who don't exercise regularly need to overcome the internal struggle to exercise more than anyone else and might have a harder time doing it.

Discipline Over Motivation

The answer is to use any form of self-coercion that we can to initiate and maintain and exercise routine. We have to stop waiting for the motivation to show up on our doorstep. We have to stop waiting to exercise until we feel like exercising. We have to stop waiting for spontaneous burst of energy to compel us into our tennis shoes. There's some scientific evidence that this is not going to happen. In order for exercise to become regular part of life, we have to make it happen. We have to coerce ourselves into exercise.