A little known fact about me is that I ran cross country and track in high school. It was the best thing for me that I didn't know I needed. It was a refuge, a space where I'd run and run and not think about my boring life. In may ways it helped me get through tough years.
Euan Ashley, a professor of cardiovascular medicine and genetics at Stanford University in a PBS interview shares some really cool insights on how exercise benefit us. First, exercise behaving like a drug treatment in repairing or restoring health:
An example would be the mitochondria, the little battery-like organelles inside each cells. When we looked at the changes with exercise, we often saw mirror image changes to the ones we see with disease. So, exercise was quite literally kind of reversing in a mirror-image-like way the changes that happen with disease and explaining a little bit about how exercise manages to protect from those diseases.
Pretty neat! Also I found this to be very true: I slept better. I was more resilient in day to day stressors. I can handle my kids screaming and being chaotic better.
People sleep better. They have better mood. They're able to breathe better. There are just so many ways in which exercise helps. And I think the key is, is just stressing you just enough so that your body then in recovery builds these mechanisms that help you deal with the stress of life in other ways.
I've picked up kettlebell workouts in the back half of 2024 and read up on the kettlebell swings have the benefit of increasing heart rate up to fat burning zone while not depleting you entirely. Part of my avoidance in working out is my training long distance running as a teenager was to give 110% of yourself to the sport. I am 40 and I have kids, a job, and chores to do. I need enough in the tank to do stuff after working out. Kettlebell swings has that special perk.
And, of course, if you want to do more, there's added benefit. One of the things I regularly tell my patients — I'm a cardiologist — is that one minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life, which means you definitely have time to exercise, because, even if you exercise even a little bit higher intensity, you get seven or eight minutes of extra life.
Hotdogs take three seconds away from your life, so I'm told. A minute of exercise for 5 minutes of extra life? I believe it.