Exercise is not optional

When was the last time you heard someone discuss the importance of exercise? I know I haven’t heard someone explicitly list all the benefits of exercising. I believe the reason people don’t exercise is because it actually all comes down to your personal goals, and most people just don’t see how exercise impacts the goals they have for themselves. I am here today to show you how exercise impacts your goals so that you make a connection between exercising and achieving the goals you have. Now there can be an argument as to how exercise impacts every area of life, but for the sake of brevity, I will stick to 3 common goals that most people have. Today I am going to review how personal fitness directly impacts the amount of respect people have for you, the amount of work you can handle, and how much you enjoy everyday life. Maintaining a physically fit body earns people's respect. Obviously how you walk and talk is more important than how you look, but that doesn’t mean how you look isn’t important. I’ve even heard a business owner say that if he had two people with matching skill levels, he would choose the one who is in better shape. The reason is because people who keep their bodies healthy tend to do a better job at managing whatever task they are given. Maintaining a healthy body increases the amount of work you can do. This applies to every kind of work, whether you are a garbage man or an engineer. By consistently exercising you increase your body's ability to work and the level of quality of your work. Cardiovascular exercises like running can especially be useful for jobs like engineering which can have a significant mental load, running increases the body's ability to handle stressful situations without feeling overwhelmed. Staying physically fit makes life more enjoyable. Cardiovascular exercise alone changes your attitude and that literally changes everything because it changes how you see the world. Strength training also has many positive long term impacts that modern research supports. One of the things I wish I learned sooner was the benefits of cardiovascular exercise. If everybody was aware of the benefits of running, everybody would be running. So what are the benefits of consistently going on a run? First it has a significant impact on your ability to handle stressful situations. (Find evidence that running impacts the body's stress response). Running improves the mind's ability to remain clear. In my personal experience as an engineering student working a job while going to school fulltime, I had many times when I would just feel overwhelmed with the amount of work I had to accomplish and the things I had to study for. One thing that would consistently improve my situation to where my emotions would literally flip would be going for a run. I would go for a run and it would completely change my attitude, perspective on my situation, and the limiting beliefs that I held on my situation. what happens when you don’t exercise? According to the World Health Organization, not being physically active accounts for approximately 3 million deaths a year. In fact, about 5.5% of all deaths worldwide have been attributed to sedentarism, a number that places this growing health concern among the five major risk factors for mortality in adult life. Among other things, physical inactivity significantly increases the risk of several chronic diseases, such as different forms of cancer, diabetes, hypertension, dementia, coronary and cerebrovascular events, bone disorders, and obesity.