Maintaining the body & health

Covid-19 has altered our lives radically.  

The luxuries of the past, when gyms could offer grand ranges of exercise classes, crowded banks of sophisticated work-out machines and the camaraderie of group sessions, have changed fundamentally. Over those long, interminable months, most of us were driven to become more self-reliant, and, with some help from those more qualified , we found we could still maintain our health and fitness and boost our natural levels of resistance to disease.

Multitudes took to the internet for guidance in home-exercise. Many of my own gym-class participants visited my philjoffefitness.com site for assistance. Many found that they could work-out, with different measures of net guidance, in the privacy of their own homes. No more gym fees, no stress in traffic, no discomfort from mask-wearing while training, no gym-equipment off-limits, or lining up to fill in the same repetitive, bureaucratic information daily.

One of the truly positive outcomes of the lock-down restrictions that denied access to gyms, was that many of us once more learned to walk!  Neighbourhood streets were alive with happy walkers, greeting strangers who were out there, walking! We became mobile outdoors, soaking up necessary vitamin-D, stimulating the cardio-respiratory systems with fresh oxygen and circulating blood more vigorously. We enjoyed the simplest, cheapest activity available to maintain fitness levels and good health.

We also learned  the important  lesson that for optimum fitness and good health, the human body requires endless maintenance.

Definition of maintenance

1: the act of maintaining: the state of being maintained: e.g. SUPPORT: The building has suffered from years of poor maintenance.

In South Africa, there seems to be a sweeping lack of awareness of this concept. Men sire children and pay nothing towards their upkeep (!) Infrastructure degenerates; roads and bridges crumble. Systems and the machines that help them function, break down: as with Eskom, no maintenance. Things should not break down if you maintain them.

Entropy, related to the laws of thermodynamics, simply declares that most things necessarily run-down, reach a state of disorder, unless energy is used to maintain functions.

So, while inept and corrupt officials may allow S.E.Os  and other systems in the country to degenerate, malfunction, run-down, we, at least, have it in our power to regularly maintain ourselves.

 Age is of no matter (the more mature we are, the greater the effort will be required to maintain our physical beings). Take care of the body and your mental, psychological, spiritual systems will function more ably.

You have only one body. Where else are you going to live?

By becoming more physically active, we help maintain our health, fitness and wellness. Make no effort, and the body will inevitably degenerate.

Maintain!

The easiest way to maintain your fitness is to raise your activity-levels. Walking, as the pandemic has helped illustrate,  is simply the most accessible form of exercise available to most. You are not aiming at winning marathons. You step outdoors, absorb your D, choose any distance with which you are comfortable, and move one leg, followed by the other! Needs no special skills, and as you do it more regularly, you can add distance, increase your pace, find infinite variation in the terrains and routes you choose to cover.

Harvard Medical School has opined:‘Walking may be one of the most powerful “medicines”  available. It can help lower your risk of heart disease, cancer, and diabetes, lower blood pressure and cholesterol levels, and even keep your memory sharp.’

Baby steps at first, but the body responds positively to this oldest form of activity and then you will feel more able to add further resistance-type exercises, when you carefully overload muscles with repetitive movements across joints, so that muscle-tissue breaks down, then reconstitutes, stronger and more flexible over time. Exercise affects your muscles and bones in similar ways. When you work out regularly, your muscles get bigger and stronger. By contrast, if you sit around doing nothing, they get smaller and weaker. The same principle holds true for bones, although the changes are less noticeable.

Not only do muscles and bones both respond to exercise, but the changes in both of them happen in tandem. That’s because muscles and bones work together to make your body move—and for maximum efficiency, muscle and bone strength need to be balanced. Consider what would happen if this balance didn’t exist. At one extreme, a weak muscle wouldn’t be able to move a big, strong bone. At the opposite end of the spectrum, if a muscle were much stronger than a bone, it would snap it.

The human body naturally maintains the right balance. As your muscles grow stronger from exercise, they pull harder on bones. The harder they tug, the more your body strengthens those bones. The reverse also holds true. If you don’t work out, your muscles get weaker, and the force they apply to bones decreases. The bones follow suit, growing weaker. So, when you do strength training to build muscle, you’re also building stronger bones, even if that’s not why you took up weight training in the first place.

An important lesson follows from this: since the muscle-bone connection plays such an important role in triggering bone strengthening, those bones that bear the load of the exercise will get the most benefit. If you only do upper-body workouts, for example, that does little for bones in your lower body. Think and train holistically. Engage the entire body in your active exercising.

So, as we greet the warmer summer season, the call is to get active, exercise and maintain!