A Fitness Program Shaped for Your Future!
Our main concern in fitness should be that it prepares us in advance for the capabilities or the conditioning we want for our future. If we want to prepare our body to have a lot of sitting in our future, all we have to do is a lot of setting around, and we can assure ourselves of a future of sitting on our keister as well as placing the demand for assistance with our activities of daily living (ADL’s) on other people!
Over the past 20–30 years, (like most other things) technology has advanced exercise equipment and many other widgets and apps that are the latest and greatest breakthrough in health and fitness. The hype that is behind some of these ads is almost enough to make someone feel like they’re getting in shape just reading or listening to all the things it claims it will do!
Whether it’s our sources of food, reduction in body fat or exercise, we have become mentally conditioned to constantly look for and then to buy into things that make health and fitness easier, but there are NO REAL shortcuts when it comes to health and fitness. A change of lifestyle is the real anecdote for getting in shape, getting rid of chronic disease in the body and for building optimal health and wellness! Keeping it basic, simple, and cheap is the best way to avoid the financial and gimmick pitfalls. The top 2 things that would address most people’s health and fitness concerns can be summed up in one sentence: less (but more nutritious) food, and regular challenging activities.
The Gym of Your Future: what I like to call the futuristic gym, is your life and is simply doing activities today that you want to be able to do tomorrow, next week, or next month. In other words, if you want to be able to walk the trail with your family at a weekend camping trip, don’t use the motor scooter in the grocery store, (let someone that really needs it, use it). We cannot expect to get people around us (as well as gadgets of convenience) to do all our physical work without our own physical capabilities shrinking in the process. Our immune system is the same, if we do not expose ourselves to our surroundings, our immune system will get weak, and unable to protect us from our surroundings.
Gap fillers: exercise sessions are gap fillers for a lifestyle that doesn’t provide enough physical activity for the level of fitness (or amount of muscularity) a person wants, just as supplements are gap fillers for diets that are lacking in certain nutrients. The above two can add value into a person’s life, but I believe it’s important that they are looked at as gap fillers.
Gap filler clause: we should all be conditioned to handle more than our daily routine requires of us, life has a way of handing us the unexpected. And exercise is one of the best ways to condition ourselves to better handle whatever it is we have to do in our daily lives, no matter if you’re a world class athlete or a senior that simply wants to stay independent and not reliant on others for daily living.
Whenever we have the opportunity at home, or work to do physical activity or manual labor, we should look at it as a muscle and fitness building opportunity. These are the real-life exercises that help prevent injury when we attempt to do it tomorrow, next week and next year!
Your activities today are tomorrow’s physical capability insurance!
