Brad Evans, LPN
Do I like to exercise? Usually, if I am honest, I don’t.
Do I like having the option to play golf, go up or down stairs, hike, play pickleball, bike, carry groceries, play a game of basketball, carry a child, get off the floor, and so on? I definitely do.
Because I am in medicine and constantly care for the sick, injured, and/or aging, thoughts like this frequently cross my mind.
In medicine, we know that if someone is bed-bound for several days and/or weeks at a time, they can rapidly lose muscle mass and bone density. After an injury or an illness, the best medical practice includes getting the patient up and active as soon as possible to limit this issue.
In general, it is hard to build muscle and yet extremely easy to lose it. Time without muscle activity inevitably causes muscle loss. As all of us age, the more we decrease physical activity, the more quickly we lose muscle. The more we lay around without activity and stop fighting gravity, the weaker and weaker we become, including our bones! Similarly, even very fit astronauts in space rapidly lose muscle despite deliberate attempts to exercise because of the lack of gravity.
All of us want to live well into our older years and enjoy retirement but with all our attempts to save money, invest in our careers, and dream of future travel, we often neglect to invest in our physical strength.
Our muscles, year after year, without physical activity, will regress. Then, as fortune would have it, we can be subjected to an illness or injury that causes us to become bedbound. After starting with an already weak physique, we become that much weaker from being bedbound. Too many people end up living the last 1-3 decades of life, suffering from an inability to do much at all or even care for themselves!
Despite the aforementioned doom and gloom, hedging against this is relatively simple!
Yes, this means you need to intentionally move your body! Yup – the E-word: Exercise!
And yes, exercise may be considered “difficult” to some extent, but it does not have to be complicated or all that time-consuming.
Recent studies in scientific literature regarding exercise create a very quick and simple idea of how just a few 5-minute exercises 4 times per week can not only prevent muscle wasting, but cause muscle growth.
For example, performing 1-2 sets of 1-2 minutes of body weight squats (with adequate intensity) 1-3 times per week is likely enough to create extreme strength improvements and can be completed in 5 minutes!
Simple exercises, performed like this, to all our muscle groups, could add up to 20-40 minutes in total per week! Imagine how good at squats you would become if you just did bodyweight squats for 1 minute every day all year! You might start only able to do 10 squats but end the year at 100 squats!
Do I like the idea of being strong and resilient when I retire? Yes.
Can I negotiate 20-40 minutes out of my entire week to do this? Yes, absolutely.
You can too!
If you need help getting on a program, we are here for you! Let’s get you started!
