Helping You to Help Yourself

Is Exercise Good Or Bad For You?

The answer is…it depends.

Exercise is a stress on your body which can either be reviving or exhausting, depending on the sum of all the stress you are experiencing.

Getting this balance right has a big influence on your health and well being, which determines whether you will ever achieve the goals to which you come to the gym to obtain.

There are six main stress types which both add to the ’stress pot’ and affect the outcome of each other. They are:

  1. Physical – right amount, too much, or too little.
  2. Chemical -organic food, balanced hormones or exposure to drugs, pesticides.
  3. Electromagnetic – good – the sun; bad – too much sun, exposure to electrical goods.
  4. Mental – positive, goal planning or negative attitudes, mental tiredness.
  5. Nutritional – eating organic food right for your metabolic type, or eating poor quality food, in too large or small quantities.
  6. Thermal – maintaining optimum body temperature or being too hot or cold.

The sum of all these stressors dictates whether the body is able to grow, repair, and digest optimally or is overstressed , imbalanced, fatigued, with a weak immune system – leaving it prone to injury, and disease.

As you can see our health is dependent on our ability to maintain a balance or homeostasis between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ stress. For example – if you are eating poor quality food, and are mentally tired then exercising intensely could be detrimental.

Conversely, exercise of the right type and intensity can help in restoring mental clarity, and processing food, for energy, repair, and elimination.

The best approach is to deal with all the sources of stress starting with those identified as your primary stressors. From this you can create a plan to manage stress – incorporating exercise, diet, lifestyle and work to bring health, and success in your exercise goals.

So how can you do this?