Week 1: Exercise
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Week 1: Exercise
200m in and I think I’m dying.
The weather has turned, as it is prone to do in mid-November, and the fleecy clouds have been chased away by a thick sheet of grey that heralds rain. I am only 200m away from home, but to go back now would be to admit defeat and I cannot do that on the first day of my Live Well Program.
I look around me and see the familiar path with new, desperate eyes. I know this pavement so well; I walk it everyday to get to the shops or the bus that takes me to work. Only I am not walking the path now, I am running it.
This is how my week of exercise starts, with a wake-up jog to get me into the swing of things. Over the course of the week I have a schedule of activities lined up, some of them facilitated by professionals, who, long ago cottoned on to the benefits of exercise, but for me, this is the beginning.
And it feels brutal.
My legs are heavy, my breath is short and I count two and a half paces for every metre I pass. In an attempt to distract myself from the general discomfort, I try to calculate how may steps my 2.5km route will need. An indecent while later I come up with the answer of 6250 steps? I balk at the thought that that is still 4000 steps short of the artifical recommendation of 10 000 steps a day*. Exercise is hard. When it feels like this, how can it be helping me to live well?
I trot on, an unfit donkey squeezed into new spandex. A few drops of rain begin to splatter and I hear my mother’s voice warning me that I’ll catch my death by being out without a hat in the rain. I could go back? No one would know…
And then it happens. The endorphins, those elusive feel good chemicals, start to kick in and I feel the heat of pumping blood reach my cold extremities. With warmth starting to glow through my body, I feel that tiny bit more committed to going the distance. It’s always been like this. A period of inactivty (as has been the case with spiralling work commitments and poor weather) makes it that much harder to start again at the bottom of the fitness ladder but as has been the case in all my boom and bust exercise regimes before, the more I do, the better I feel.
Why is this? Why does exercise give us such a buzz? Why is it such a key factor in improving health such that it has been shown to reduce the risk of heart disease by up to half in certain populations (1)? Or even reverse diabetes (2)? The science is still being untangled but it makes sense that exercise is so good for us, when considering that this is what our bodies evolved to do (3). By making the heart pump faster, by prompting muscles to stretch and then grow, and by burning the fuel we intake exactly for these purposes, we strengthen the matter that makes the machine of the human body. It would make sense then, that things that are good for the body activate the reward system in the brain.
But it is not always like this. The next day’s bike ride feels gruelling as muscles already tested from the run, protest at being used again. In my case, there is no perfect positive correlation between exercise done and feel good factor, no, for me it is a constant battle against inertia.
As childhood photos would show, I was not a natural athlete and sport was the one subject I just couldn’t crack. Although I took pride in receiving top marks in all my academic and arts subjects, the perennial failing grade in PE was something I thought could never be rectified. Grizzly days in chafing gym shorts wrung out all possible enjoyment from sport classes and I was the literal last picked for teams (do they still do that mortifying practice?) As soon as I was able to I gave up PE and settled down at a desk, freed from compulsory torture at last.
Before and after… As you can see, I wasn’t the prototypical young runner, preferring dance instead. Although I kept up my love of dance, I’ve also branched out into sport, something I could not have imagined in the horrible days of PE at school.
But there could be no denying the endorphin allure of exercise, even for a pudgy British-born Southeast Asian like myself. I continued to take regular ballet throughout school, and despite a few fallow years at University, running became my go-to when I became a doctor. Running perhaps overstates what I do. By runnning I mean a gentle trot for 2 - 5 km a few times a week. The experience, as described above, does not feel intuitive to my body but it has become necessary. Those weeks when I feel more agitated, more anxious, generally correlate with less exercise rather than more.
And you can imagine how I have felt this week with scheduled exercise everyday. Most of the time, the cycles, runs and YouTube workouts felt middling to pleasant, but occasionally I glimpsed that elusive “exercise high.” The most striking example of this was during a Dancefit class run by WorkWell doctor, Dr Joshi (see more of her routines on Instagram @doctor_dancing). The day had been tense, filled with admin nightmares and writer’s block, but the sheer act of concentrating on a routine did exactly what Dr Joshi promised it would; my thoughts were elsewhere, focused on the body, instead of making anxious mischief in my brain. Soon I was in the zone, mastering a salsa two step with an oldschool Craig David backtrack to reinforce the endorphin rush.
So my assessment of exercise as a method of living well?
Well, you can see I was already pretty much a convert, but the dedicated week of exercise has reinforced my opinion of not just its health benefits (although I appreciate being able to conquer the stairs more easily on Sunday than I did on Monday), but its ability to make you feel better. I feel it, I truly do. After a week of forcing myself to sign up for online classes and to make sure there is some evidence to show all you faithful followers that I am actually doing what I said I would, I feel the benefits. I am more relaxed, more rested and invigorated.
The sustainability of daily exercise with a full time job and other commitments, may be called into question once lockdown eases but as a means of staying well and sane during November? I can’t recommend it enough.
* The ‘10 000 step a day’ target was an arbitrary figure cited in the run up to the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games by a Japanese pedometer manufacturer. It caught on.
References
Morris JN, Everitt MG, Pollard R, Chave SPW, Semmence AM. Vigorous exercise in leisure‐time: protection against coronary heart disease. Lancet 1980; 2:1207–10.
Church TS, Blair SN, Cocreham S, et al Effects of aerobic and resistance training on hemoglobin A1c levels in patients with type 2 diabetes: a randomized controlled trial. JAMA 2010;304:2253–2262
Mattson P. Evolutionary aspects of human exercise - born to run purposefully.Ageing Res Rev 2012 Jul;11(3):347-52.
