Everyone should know that to live a healthy lifestyle you need to make sure that you incorporate regular exercise in your week.
So that you can:
- lift 1,000 lbs on a deadlift
- squat 500 lbs
- run a 5-minute mile
- have 7% body fat
- be able to push a bus out of the way to help save the old woman crossing the street
Right?!
Ok, all of those may be a slight exaggeration, but not all exercise has to have the goal of being able to do a certain thing or lift a certain amount of weight.
Quite honestly those goals above are all amazing things that our body can do if we trained properly, but it would take a few years, or a lot more, for most of us to achieve.
Our bodies are capable of so many amazing things but our biggest limitation is that some of us don’t understand the real reason behind incorporating regular exercise.
When I meet with clients, some have specific goals to help improve their body composition, train for a marathon, become stronger just because. For the rest, they just want to be healthy.
There are many definitions of being healthy but I’d say the biggest reason is that people want to be able to run a 5K if they want to, want to be able to go on a bike ride without struggling, want to get down and up off the floor with their grandkids, travel without worry, do their own yard work and continue to be independent – they want to live their best lives.
In order to achieve this goal of being an overall healthy individual, we need to make it a goal to incorporate regular exercise into our daily routine and make sure that the movement patterns we implement for our program are maintaining or increasing our functional ability.
As coaches, we make sure that we incorporate mobility, corrective exercises, cardiovascular training, and strength training to help our clients stay functional.
Each exercise, each movement pattern, and each workout we program caters to our client’s current abilities and helps them increase their functional abilities.
Just like you would take your car into the shop to make sure that all the parts are functioning at their best, we are doing the same with exercise for the body.
Benefits of Cardio, Strength Training and Mobility
Incorporating more cardiovascular exercise helps to maintain the elasticity of your heart muscle (think of cardio as yoga for your heart muscle). Strength training helps to maintain/increase the strength of your heart for optimal function, maintaining/increasing the strength of your muscles and bones to be able to stay independent while decreasing your chances of chronic illness and disease. Flexibility training helps to maintain the elasticity of our skeletal muscle to help increase our range of motion during our lifts, preventing structural injuries and help release muscle tension which can cause stress in our shoulders/upper body.
All three types of exercise are super important – not just because they help us to achieve our specific fitness goals – but also because they help us maintain our functional ability, improve our overall health, and prevent health issues in the future.
I know that I want to be that 100-year old that still drives, is living in her house, and able to get up and down off the floor.
Having the right program for you and your goals makes a huge difference.
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