Your Health Is Your Greatest Investment
The saying goes-
“You don’t know how important health is until you don’t have it anymore.”
Life today is increasingly busy and stressful. Work is demanding more hours and onto of this you have family commitments you have to attend to.
A huge amount of jobs today are sedentary or requite only light activity. Correlated with this is super easy access to calorific food, increasing levels of obesity and lifestyle related illnesses.
The number of deaths caused by heart and circulatory diseases in under 65s is increasing, peaking at 18,668 in 2017, up from 17,982 five years earlier. This represents a 4% rise in the last five years.
Just over a quarter of the worlds adult population is insufficiently active.
Much of the illness and poor health we experience today is lifestyle related, due to lack of exercise combined, poor management of stress and an overabundance of calorie dense food.
Life up until very recent history except for a very small percentage of wealthy population was physically hard. In order to survive you had to graft as there were few labour saving devices, even washing your clothes by hand took some effort!
Our bodies over a very long time have adapted to work best in an environment where they are physically challenged. We are designed to move and our health expresses itself positively when we do.
A Very Personal Story
I come from a family with a history of poor health. My father died of heart disease when I was 14, from his third and final heart attack. He was obese, ate poorly, didn’t manage his stress well and had poor sleep. It was the perfect storm for illness.
His first ‘warning’ heart attack when I was 10.
A second and much larger one that also led to a stroke hit him when I was 11. He was resustitaed a number of times and he was then intensive care for a number of weeks.
Following this his battled with poor health for another 3 years but aside from some physio therapy to help him to learn to walk again after the stroke he didn’t really make any other changes.
I firmly believe had he taken more proactive measures to improve his health by exercising, eating better, managing his stress and sleeping better he would have lived for many more years than he did. He died at 63 years old.
A brother of mine from the same side of the family died at the age of 55, he too was obese.
Exercise has a massive positive effect on your health
Just a few benefits include
Improved regulation of blood sugar
Positive effect on mental health & stress
Helps fight age related mental decline
Reduced waistline & visceral fat
Improved coordination & balance
So with all the irrefutable evidence at to the importance of exercising you should hopefully be asking yourself how much is your health worth to you?
What sort of investment is better than one into your health?
Can you realistically afford a health episode which could potentially make you unable to work for a number of months?
Its your responsibility to take preemptive measures and start investing in your health.
Where does personal training fit into this?
When your time is limited you want to ensure that the time you invest is spent wisely.
Just 2-3 hours of focused training in the gym per week can be enough to reap most of the health benefits of exercise.
In addition to this I encourage incorporating small daily habits to up your overall level of movement in addition to this. These an be simple things such as waking more, using the stairs, having a stand up desk. Creating these habits as part of your lifestyle is a key component.
Joining a gym with a vague idea of exercising is a recipe for failure and frustration.
If you were to make a financial investment you would seek the help of a financial advisor. The same logic should apply to your health & fitness and you should seek expert advise from an experienced trainer on how to exercise effectively.
Your health is Your Greatest Investment.
