“All things are poison and nothing is without poison; only the dose permits something not to be poisonous.” - Paracelsus
Exercising to stay healthy is not a new idea. Possibly even before the time of Socrates, many people, primarily the privileged, exercised regularly to improve their health. Our ancestors’ workouts were much less structured than ours; most of what they did centered on spontaneous movements that challenged their fitness levels. Activities such as swimming, dancing, and swinging clubs, as well as competitions involving lifting heavy rocks, logs, and animal carcasses provided a way to get stronger. Even our country’s Founding Fathers extolled the virtues of exercise, praising the health benefits of taking daily swims in icy water, long hikes, and regular intervals of plyometric exercises such as leaping and skipping. Teddy Roosevelt was well known for his rugged persona which he reinforced with horseback riding and boxing. Herbert Hoover, concerned his girth would make it hard for him to walk while serving his term as president, invented a game dubbed Hoover-ball, in which he threw a weighted ball back and forth to his security guards for thirty minutes every day.
It has not been that long in our history since it was only the wealthy who needed to think up ways to stay fit. For centuries, most people were too busy laboring through life to be concerned about getting enough exercise. Regular physical activity was baked into daily survival and rest was a luxury. Fast forward to our current sedentary lifestyles and we find that we need reminders and cajoling to get up and move around. Given the strong evidence of exercise’s role in disease prevention, we rightfully focus on finding ways to get moving and do so at a level that is hard enough to be challenging. But in our efforts to get moving, we may have lost sight of a component of exercise that is essential to improving fitness—how we recover from hard work.
Many years ago, I competed in two half marathons. My first race was a disaster; I overtrained in the weeks prior to the race and did not allow enough time for my body to recover. I woke up on race day with the beginnings of a cold. That race was a miserable experience. I was much better prepared for my second half marathon, having done cross training and followed proper tapering and rest schedules prior to race day. Since I was familiar with the marathon’s route I knew how to pace myself, reserving energy for the steep hill I would face in the last mile of the race, right before the finish line. My strategy worked and I was able to power up that last hill. Pushing myself with an all-out effort over the finish line. As I passed people on the hill and charged toward the finish line, I was excited to have ended the race with a decent time, only to suddenly run smack into a wall of runners who had come to a complete stop.
Having to stop so suddenly after working so intensely was a less than pleasant, but certainly memorable, experience. Charging smack into a sea of people who were hardly moving, I quickly felt sick, clammy, and lightheaded. My muscles started to seize up and became stiff, quickly feeling like concrete. By the time I broke free of the crowd I could hardly move. My finish line runner’s high had shifted to crushing exhaustion. Because I was unable to cool down properly, the damage of coming to a stop lingered for days after the race—my muscles were sore and stiff for much longer than they should have been. It is said that experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want; I learned very quickly about the role recovery plays in how exercise impacts our fitness. What we do after exercising is just as important as the workout itself.
Science has only recently come to understand the important processes that occur during exercise recovery. We now know that many of the benefits associated with exercise are cultivated once the work has ended, making recovery just as important as the workout itself. Exercise that requires a bit of a push puts stress on the body; as intensity increases, so does the stress. Provided it is hard enough, a workout will drain our energy reserves and fatigue the muscles, as well as deplete certain hormones and enzymes. Harder workouts frequently cause microscopic tears in the muscle fibers. These changes lead to inflammation, which we generally want to avoid, but the inflammation from exercise has a positive effect—provided, that is, we have time to recover. It is during recovery when the body repairs itself and gets stronger; muscle growth, fat utilization, improved insulin sensitivity, and a more resilient cardiovascular system are the body’s way of adapting to the stress of a workout. Exercise may break things down, but recovery helps us to build back better.
Many of us conflate rest with recovery, but the two are very different. Rest is passive; it starts when we cease a particular movement and energy expenditure drops. The body needs rest after physical activity; very few of us are Energizer Bunnies that can keep going without some type of break. Even light activities that do not significantly elevate the heart rate require a period of rest. No matter what the activity, muscles eventually become fatigued, even if we are planting flowers, strolling through a park, or washing the car. Exercise, however, requires a special kind of rest because of how it stresses the body for a specific period of time. To repair and restore what has been depleted, the body requires proper rehydration and nutrition, sufficient time for the muscles to repair, and an opportunity to reestablish metabolic processes that will bring the body back into a balanced state. Referred to as homeostasis, this balanced state is achieved when our bodily systems are humming along nicely and operating at optimal levels—a feel-good side effect that comes as our fitness improves.
Talk of stress, inflammation, and depleting energy reserves may be disconcerting for some, perhaps even creating a wariness toward exercise out of fear of getting injured. Although our risk of injury does increase with intensity, active recovery can reduce that risk by providing a nudge that gradually pushes our fitness levels higher. There is no doubt that physical activity is good for us, but occasionally pushing ourselves to our edge, even for brief periods, leads to significant beneficial changes in the body. The kind of stress that exercise puts on the body is not a threat, but more like a type of medicine—it can do a great deal of good provided we take the proper dose. Active recovery is a way of exposing us to small doses of stress, giving the body time to adjust. Following the principles of active recovery, we intersperse very brief intervals of hard work into an otherwise moderate or light workout. This might include increasing your walking pace for a short period of time to a level at which your breathing rate is uncomfortable, followed by a period that allows you to recover by walking at a comfortable pace. Repeating these intervals eventually builds endurance, both in the cardiovascular system and in the muscles, while the body increases its capacity to respond to more stress as it gets stronger.
Anything can become poisonous when taken in excess. Just because one type of exercise is good for you does not mean it can’t lead to injury if you overdo it. This is why cross training, which involves varying exercises, is considered a form of active recovery. Cross training helps avoid overuse injuries as different modes of exercise work the heart and muscles differently, providing the body sufficient time to recover from a previous workout. It also helps to avoid fatigue and boredom. The key to cross training is finding an activity that is different from what you usually do. Swimmers may want to take a break a few times a week to ride a bike; a twice a week Pickleball game will use different muscles than those needed for a brisk walk. Alternating strength training with running or cycling workouts helps the cardiovascular system recover while gaining muscle symmetry and balance. Mind-body modalities such as Tai Chi, Pilates, and yoga, as well as disciplines such as the martial arts provide novel movement patterns that can promote core stability, improve flexibility, and help develop mental focus and balance.
With each new study that confirms how exercise helps to prevent disease, I wonder if perhaps we are becoming too heavy handed in promoting its health benefits. Although I believe exercise can be medicine, one that enables us to live with greater ease and enjoyment, reducing it to a treatment that must be taken at a certain dose at the right time simply sucks the joy out of it. It seems many of us are born with an innate desire to exercise; my kids ran, jumped, skipped, kicked balls, rode bikes, and swam for hours without any prodding or encouragement. We have taken what comes naturally, slapped a formula on it, developed watches to monitor it, and then promoted it as a medicine that must be taken to ward off disease. Is it any wonder people aren’t motivated to get up and move?
Perhaps we’d all benefit by revisiting what our ancestors seemed to know about staying healthy--be sure to exercise, keep it fun, mix it up, and find time to rest. What we now know about the important balance between exercise and recovery can guide us in deciding how and when to get moving. By combining hard work with periods of recovery, we can bump up our fitness levels without the need for long, arduous periods of work that come with excessive fatigue, soreness, and a higher risk of injury. How might you find variety in your exercise routine? What might you do to ramp up the intensity from time to time? I invite you to take a tip from our long-ago relatives and see if you can find ways to include more spontaneous ways of moving. Dancing, leaping, and maybe even jumping into ice water might be fun, although I recommend caution if you decide to lift heavy objects such as rocks and logs--especially animal carcasses. Your neighbors may start to wonder.