I don't know too many people who don't think that they need to exercise more. I think I need to exercise more. To illustrate: my current weekly exercise routine consists of biking to work every day (about fifteen minutes each way, more uphill on the way home), and playing an intense two hours of five-on-five, turf rules ultimate frisbee every Monday.
That's it. That's all I do every week. And I don't know if I can even count the biking, to be honest: that's fifteen minutes each way, but I never arrive at work sweaty and when I get home I'm not really breathing hard. So I'm getting a half hour of 'exercise' every weekday, but I'm not really burning many more calories than I would walking.
Here's the question though: is the point of exercise to burn calories? For people who want to lose weight, it definitely is. I'm pretty fit, but I can't run more than a couple kilometres without needing to slow down; I can bike fifty kilometres or so on my road bike, but not at the kind of speeds that professional atheletes do; I can play two hours of ultimate without collapsing - although I usually feel like I need to at the end. So do I need to exercise to get more fit, or just to make sure my muscles don't atrophe? I definitely don't need to do it get rid of excess fat.
The thing is, I saw this series of pictures of some elderly Asian men last weekend (oddly enough, in the bathroom of a cafe I stopped to eat at with my family while on the road). These eight old guys - impossible to tell how old, but one of them had a long, white ZZ Top-style beard - were thin as rails and having a good time hanging out on some park benches. They didn't look underfed, just skinny like you would expect an old guy to be. That's eight all together, and it could have been a set-up, but in North America you'd be hard pressed to find any group of old men that didn't include at least one pot-belly.
What I'm trying to reconcile in my mind is: How much exercise do I really need to do, and how much of my presumed need is from a cultural bias that says everyone needs to sweat for at least a half hour or so per day to be healthy? Now, don't take any of that the wrong way: I love exercise and I am happy to do it on a daily basis, but what level of 'exericise' constitutes exercise? I know what a fitness trainer would tell me, and I know what the Canada Food Guide would tell me - but how much of that well-known, oft-repeated wisdom is a product of our over-fed, poorly nurished North American consciousness? Is that wisdom erring on the side of caution, knowing how easy it is for the average North American to pop over to MacDonalds for a quick fix? I guess my question is: What is the evoloution of 'exercise' in North America?
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Like a lot of things that concern our day to day lives, and cause considerable stress for a great many people, it's a fairly recent invention from what I can gather. There's a short little summary of its introduction here: http://ezinearticles.com/?A-Brief-History-of-Exercise-Part-I&id=2262057
ReplyDeleteFor someone who doesn't need to lose weight for health reasons, I can't think of any 'prescription' or set amount of exercise that wouldn't be wholly arbitrary. If you're not engaged in competitive sports, when you've taken care of the basics of maintaining your body in a 'good state of health' (another fairly ambiguous term I suppose), anything beyond that would be superfluous...and probably has been for a considerable time, even before the Industrial Revolution. Once you moved beyond the ability to do your day to day work, tilling land or raising livestock, the 'peak physical condition' thing seems a bit silly - it must've been clear for some time that we no longer need to outrun saber-toothed tigers or bring down mastodons. Keeping ourselves in peak physical shape can serve little except in perhaps, with the bizarre cultural standards of beauty that currently dictate such things, mate selection or a sense of security for protecting one's family if you really stretch it. Just my $0.02.
I think you're right, there isn't much of a real reason to do it - as long as you're getting the 'required' amount. But I enjoy going a little bit further. :)
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