Current Thoughts
| What is the difference between activity, exercise, and training? Activity is physical movement that’s well within your capacity, it doesn’t cause adaptive stress or improvement. For most people things like walking, gardening, cleaning your house are well within their capacity. Going on a 20 min walk isn’t going to cause a high degree of stress. Exercise is physical activity that induces a stress. Dancing at a wedding can be categorized as exercise because it increases your heart rate and strains your muscle. This is why we see dance as a common component of group exercise classes. If the stress is unique, either in it’s magnitude or it’s direction, it will cause an adaptation. For example, someone who began to play pickleball weekly would initially see improvements in their cardio vascular fitness, strength endurance, power, agility, hand eye coordination, etc. At some point though, they would have fully adapted to that stress and it wouldn’t cause any more adaptations or improvement. It would feel like exercise, and it is, but their wouldn’t be any changes to their fitness from it. Training is exercise that is planned, progress, and purposeful. It has a specific outcome that it is focused on achieving, the stress is managed appropriately to create adaptation without excessive fatigue, and there is a plan in place to get there. Fitness can only be achieved through training. That is not to say that activity or exercise are bad, they are most definitely good. Someone who consistently trains is going to have the ability to participate in more activity and more exercise. For example, someone who does our group classes will be able to go play a pickleball game or go to a climbing gym for a couple hours and participate with a high degree of capacity compared to someone who just went on a 20 minutes walk each day. This is the most common gap in awareness that I see amongst active people. They equate exercise to training when they are not the same. I don’t want that to come across as judgemental. 75% of the population isn’t even active so if you’re a regular tennis player, you’re doing really really good! I just don’t want that person to find themselves 30 years down the line suffering from sarcopenia and loss of strength and wondering why. You get to choose how to steward you body and which path to walk, my responsibility is to make you aware of what each path holds. |
Thinbs I like
Life is complex and we have an unlimited amount of choices when it comes to how to spend our time, money, and attention. Essentialism by Greg McKeown is a great book for deciding what is essential for you to focus on.
Thinbs to Check Out
Bryan Johnson’s goal is to never die. Do I recommend you follow his protocol? No, but it’s interesting to hear his insights from this pursuit.
Have a great week!
David
