People often get confused on the difference between activity and exercise.
Active: is movement.
Exercise: a process or activity carried out for a specific purpose, especially one concerned with a specified area or skill.
Notice the difference?
Exercise is repetitive and deliberate activity.
Being active is great! I think it plays a huge role in helping people become healthier! The only downside that I see, is people mistake activity as synonymous to exercise.
Make sure you are doing BOTH, not 1 or the other. They both have amazing benefits, but they are different benefits.
Staying active, like going for a walk/moving around more, is great for the mind and body by getting your blood flowing and body moving in general. To be able to go outside or take time away from work or a project helps enhance creativity, keeping your cortisol (stress hormones) down, helping get your endorphins (happy hormones) up and just overall enhances your quality of life. Sitting for long periods of time is one of the worst things you can do to your body and brain. Recent research has shown that it is critical for people to get up every 30mins from sitting. The one thing that being active doesn’t elicit is physical training results.
Being active doesn’t make your posture better. It doesn’t help you knee pain or help you achieve any body goals. This is why activity and exercise are not synonymous.
Exercise is deliberate training that elicits in results (for better or for worse). There are obviously a lot of bad trainers out there but there are a lot of good ones and a majority of them are somewhere in between. There are also a million forms of exercise from weight lifting to yoga and everything in between. Depending on what your goals are and your personal strengths and weaknesses, certain forms of exercise are definitely better than another. If you are struggling to get started with exercise or you know someone who is here are my 3 tips for starting:
- Start.
- Even if it is literally only 2 mins. Everyone has 2 mins! Pick a couple of exercises that seem intriguing to you and do them in a circuit like 30s of work, 15s rest. Building the habit of exercising is the hardest part for people, so I suggest you can’t have breakfast/coffee before you do your 2 min or you can’t go to bed at night before you do your 2 min (give yourself an easy, tangible goal).
- Start with things you like then work towards educating yourself on what might be better exercises/how to do them properly. I think the best way to do this would be hiring a trainer, but I also know that not everyone can afford one or values them enough to use them, so there are a lot of great accounts on instagram like Shelby Trained, Achieve Fitness, and Alice Liveing that you can learn from!