Effects of Exercise

"Exercise is the most transformative thing that you can do for your brain today." Wendy Suzuki

Two weeks ago I spoke about the importance of exercise for me especially during high stress periods of time like exams and/or a global pandemic. I would argue that exercise is something I cannot live without. It gives my weeks a certain structure and leaves me energised for the rest of the day. This week I would like to dive a bit deeper into how exercise benefits us?

Firstly I need to tell you that as with other things in life exercise is not a "one size fits all" type of thing. Everyone enjoys different types of activities but most of all everyone has different levels of preparation (be it genetic or physical). The point is that the best exercising habit is the one you can stick to. Running a marathon every single day without preparation is slightly ambitious when starting off. Doing 2 km every day and gradually increasing the distance is more reasonable. It is also more enjoyable and achievable, thus more sustainable.

I have been very lucky to have had loads of sports experience throughout my life. I have tried tennis, football, athleticism and volleyball. Most of my experience being of course in the latter. Basically I have gone through an absurd amount of different workouts and muscular activation exercises to simply play a really intense version of "don't let the balloon touch the floor". This being said exercise can be as simple as choosing to walk, taking the stairs or just vacuuming the house (one of the most underrated workouts out there).

Here are the ways that exercise has changed my life:

Stress release

Exercise as stress release is one of the main reasons I started it in the first place. After every session of sports or weight lifting there is a certain satisfaction that I achieved something. It leaves a "I did something today" vibe which is pretty neat. This is thanks to endorphins that are released during exercising which make for a general feeling of well-being.

Socialising opportunity

Exercising is a great way to spend time together with people. It is one of the reasons I enjoy my volleyball trainings. Even non-team sports can be made more fun in a group. Furthermore when training with others there is somewhat of an accountability placed on you. Giving up is a lot more difficult when there's a little social pressure involved.

A way to be more creative

When exercising we usually enter a state of deep flow or hyperfocus. This means when we return it is kind of like we just hit refresh or gave a quick restart to the system. This refresh can help us be more creative. I am speaking purely from personal experience here, this being said there is a study that links walking to creativity – I find this funny because the fact that we have some sort of metric to measure creativity seems funky to me.

An investment in your future

There is a lot of information out there about the benefits of exercise for the long term. To boil it down though – if you take care of your body it will serve you longer. On top of that exercise also helps with other aspects of life. I will continue bringing up this quote from Charles Duhigg “exercise is a keystone habit that triggers widespread change.” It really just captures perfectly my beliefs about exercise being a pillar of personal productivity.

Drawing to a close – as I said before the best exercising habit is the one you can stick to. This means that there has to be an occasional reflection on your exercise habit. The exercise at hand should be challenging enough to be interesting but not impossible either. For some taking a walk is all the exercise they need, for others it's an hour's worth of weight lifting followed by intense cardio sessions. Personally I have taken the lazier road out of all. I do my workouts in bursts – I tend to do short but explosive workouts and then just proceed to be a complete couch potato for the rest of the time, and that works perfectly for me!

This Week's Suggestions:

🎬 The brain-changing benefits of exercise:

Mini-lecture about the science of the benefits of exercise by neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki.

📑 Here are some studies I looked at for inspiration:

Go and get active this week!