A childhood with an emphasis on skinnyI have no recollection of the term “strength training” growing up. I entered high school in 2006 and threw myself into cross-country running, where slender was the ideal body type. The petite stars of “The Hills” and “Gossip Girl” covered CosmoGirl and Seventeen next to “get bikini-ready” headlines, and judges on “America’s Next Top Model” scrutinized women’s bodies on national TV.

Instead of weight-lifting, I was focused on squeezing into a pair of low-rise jeans from Delia’s.

The only time I recall lifting a weight as a teen was on a gym date with a guy from school. He showed me how to do a barbell bench press and dripped sweat on me while spotting me.

If this was a woman’s experience trying to lift weights, I wanted nothing to do with it. Plus, with no resources or role models showcasing the benefits of getting strong, I assumed that it only led to a muscular upper body, the total opposite of what I was seeing in my magazines.

The truth is strength training can improve bone, heart and brain health, boost your metabolism, preserve quality of life as you age, reduce the risk of disease and more. But even if I knew all this when I was younger, I still probably would’ve avoided it, given the mental images strength training conjured.

One of the first-known female pioneers in weightlifting was Abbye “Pudgy” Stockton, credited for popularizing Santa Monica’s Muscle Beach with her husband in the 1930s and ‘40s, per the Los Angeles Times. But it wasn’t until the ‘80s that women and weightlifting become more mainstream, after Arnold Schwarzenegger put bodybuilding on the map when he appeared in the 1977 documentary “Pumping Iron,” per the New York Times.

From there, Lisa Lyons, Carla Dunlap, Rachel McLish and more bodybuilders emerged in the ’80s, and before long, gyms were turning co-ed.

Fast-forward to the 2000s, and at-home DVD workouts that focused on building strength became bestsellers, like Tony Horton’s P90X and Jillian Michael’s “Shred” workouts. CrossFit also rose to stardom and introduced women and men alike to strength training (with some injuries along the way).

By 2010, when I started college, I still didn’t see myself in strength training. Doing a workout DVD in my dorm room wasn’t practical, and CrossFit felt beyond my skillset. After I gained the freshman 15, I became hawk-eyed on weight loss. My senior year, I picked up running again, and after graduation, I ran my first half marathon.

After the race, when I combed through professional photos, one caught my attention. I thought my arms looked strong. I purchased it and made it my profile picture on Facebook. Years later, friends and family told me that photo concerned them because of how thin I was.

In 2017, I started working as a social media editor at a health and fitness magazine, and I wrote a before-and-after about my 40-pound weight loss dating back to college. After it published, I did what all the editors warned me not to: look at the comments. It was a mixed bag, but one that bluntly stated I looked better in the before image burned into my mind.

I got into the New York City Marathon that same year, so I added more miles to my runs. I ignored advice that I should cross-train and stuck to hitting the pavement, with the occasional spin or Barry’s class. I was all in on legs, and that seemed to work for me up until that point — why would I do otherwise?

I kept running, with the perception that beauty and skinny went hand in hand.

A gateway into strength training

When the pandemic hit in March 2020, my now-husband, Sam, and I retreated to his parents’ for a few months. At first, running was my sanctuary, but it became lonely. I turned to social media and joined live workouts led by fitness instructors and studio owners.

In no time, I was doing one or two a day in the basement that became my makeshift gym. I started sharing workout reviews on my Instagram to help others looking for a sense of semi-normalcy.

Some classes encouraged using weights, and my future father-in-law had a set of adjustable iron-plated dumbbells. “I’ll just use the 5-pounder,” I thought to myself. I never increased the load, but choosing to reach for anything was new for me.

Around the same time, thought of teaching fitness crept into my mind. While we were hunkering down, I yearned to progress forward, so I enrolled in an online course to become a certified group fitness instructor in July 2020. I shared the news on Instagram with a flex.

Enough has been said about the benefits of exercise. 30 minutes of exercising everyday is known to have long-term health effects, including lowering your BP, better cardiovascular health, and even weight loss. However, do you know that for every hour you exercise, you can actually increase your lifespan by three hours? Yes, you heard that right!

Exercise, and live longer
Dr. John Scharffenberg, a professor of nutrition at Loma Linda University in California, shared some tips for living a longer life in a YouTube video. At the remarkable age of 100, the centenarian shared that one of the biggest tools to live longer is exercise, and for every hour you exercise, you add three hours to your life. He also mentioned that while exercise is important at every age, you must definitely exercise between the ages of 40-70, as your body start to degenerate at 40.

Here are some more tips that he added:
Tobacco: The doctor outlines the dangers of tobacco, known since the 1964 Surgeon General report. He said that when it comes to Alzheimer’s, it has an extremely small percentage of tobacco users. That is because tobacco users do not live long enough to get any chronic disease later on.
Alcohol: Following closely on the heels of tobacco is alcohol. Dr. Scharffenberg said that especially for women, alcohol increases the chances of getting breast cancer. He also added that while earlier studies claim that two drinks a day for men, and one drink a day for women was probably safe, new studies refute that, and add no amount of alcohol is safe.
Exercise: As mentioned earlier, Dr. Scharffenberg is a huge advocate of exercise, and recommends it everyday. He adds that even if someone is obese and exercises everyday, he will still outlive a person who is thin, but does not exercise. And, while a lot of people think that 40 is the age to slow down, on the contrary, one should start exercising the most from this age, upto the age of 70.

Smoking: At one point of life, smoking will kill you, says Dr. John Scharffenberg. It could be at 40 or 60, depending on how long you have been smoking. And unlike alcohol, on which debate is sketchy, there is no debate on smoking – even 1 cigarette is not recommended.

Diet: Dr. Scharffenberg largely recommends a vegetarian diet, with an occasional lean meat here and there. According to him, “The optimum diet is the vegetarian diet. Everybody should know this. It’s not something unusual.” He notes that top scientists advised the U.S. government in 2015 that a vegetarian diet is among the optimal dietary patterns, as it can help reduce the risk of age-related diseases.
This apart, Dr. Scharffenberg recommends low consumption of sugar, reducing fat intake, and other lifestyle changes that can make you live longer.

True exercise begins with the will — especially when aligned with the One who made us.

By now, almost all of us in this country are aware of the health crisis that exists. Obesity even in the youngest has skyrocketed in the past few decades. Type 2 diabetes rates (once called adult-onset diabetes) are at a record high for all ages. We as a country spend more on healthcare than anyone else in the world and get some of the worst results. I could go on but safe to say we are all tired of hearing about the woes.

Amid all the bad news, I have a confession to make. I hate exercise, or working out, as you might say. For those who have read my previous writings or know of our mission, this might seem surprising to you. So let me explain.

It’s not that I hate the act of exercising my body (and mind). It’s that I don’t like the term exercise itself (or anything related) and the connotation it carries. And not only do I dislike it, although admittedly I have used it many times before (and probably will to some degree) — I think the term itself and our perspective around it is a huge reason why we are in such a bad situation in this country. 

Unlike many other places in the world, and certainly unlike much of what existed previous to our modern times, exercise today is often regarded as an exclusive commodity. But unfortunately, for various reasons, the notion of exercise has become dichotomized, compartmentalized and “obligatized” (my new word) in a way that has increasingly created barriers (mental, physical and logistic) for people to be as active as we are designed to be. It has led us to believe that the only activity worth having is the kind of movement that is carved out of an otherwise busy schedule, often costs us a reasonable (or not) amount of money, and can be quantified in memberships, calories, minutes and inches. 

Don’t get me wrong. I am a super-busy guy who believes that not carving out time for regular movement is a huge mistake, a culprit of many of our woes and that regular activity is one of the most essential things in the universe. Truly, we move therefore we are, even if our movements are significantly restricted by injury or disability. But in the process of making a case for prioritizing movement just as much as we prioritize our work and other entertainment, I think we have done a massive disservice in regard to a fundamental problem that exists beneath so many of our health woes. 

Simply put, never in the history of our world has a group of people burned so few calories in comparison to what they have consumed. It’s not just that the restaurant business has taken off like a rocket to nowhere; the grocery expenditures (and I am not talking about rising costs) are climbing just behind them. Meanwhile, we as a country keep trying to find ways to motivate more people to exercise more often. And despite billions of dollars spent, it’s not working for many reasons, not the least of which involves the allure of the online world for everything from buying to entertaining to networking to being (or whatever we think this is). 

Last fall, I attended what has long been one of the biggest rivalry matchups of the year, the Mater Dei vs. Reitz High School football game. Held in the historic Reitz Bowl, it was a gorgeous evening pitting two teams that had only lost a collective three games all season. The game came down to the final seconds, after (unfortunately as an MD grad) Reitz stormed back from 10 points down to take the lead with less than 90 seconds to play. All was perfect except for one gaping problem: the stands weren’t even half full. Years and decades prior, as detailed by my uncle who went to high school in the 1970s, not only were the stands often full, but even the sloping, grassy area next to the stands was adorned with rabid fans hoping to cheer on their team. But in recent years, it has been obvious that people aren’t showing up like they used to, just like they stopped showing up years ago at Wesselman Par 3, the only 18-hole par-3 course in the state, which the city of Evansville was forced to shut down.

You might be wondering: What does a football game on a Friday night have to do with my disdain for our perspective toward exercise (especially when adding a slice of pizza and an ice cream cone doesn’t exactly evoke images of fitness)? The reality is that all activity remains activity, and all activity burns calories and activates our minds and systems to an extent that inactivity does not. A simple walk to the grocery store to get a few items, or down to the corner pizza place to secure the pies. Raking the yard, gardening, going outside to throw a football, or even hitting a few golf balls on a Friday night (back when the lights were on). Or maybe even a run down to see a family member or friend who lives around the corner, or simply walking to school much like our predecessors did. It all remains movement no matter how we categorize it. 

Don’t get me wrong. There are benefits to prolonged physical activity involving sustained elevation of heart rate and respiration. But what other people and countries have figured out, which we in the U.S. have largely lost in awareness and execution, is that when you build in activity as an essential part of our lives, it gets so much easier to pursue a healthy balance of calories in, and calories out. Yet when our perspective has become that exercise or working out is only worthwhile when it is a carved-out commodity, we get stuck. Especially if we can’t find or prioritize the time to do this, which leads us to believe the rest of what we do doesn’t matter physically and psychologically (which activity hugely influences), putting us in a serious pickle (especially if we eat a bunch of them). But if we saw all activity, even getting up from the couch to turn the TV channel, as worthwhile and valuable to the moving people we are, then it would be a monstrous step in redefining just how we go about approaching the health crisis that exists today. 

Truth be told, I don’t hate exercise. I actually like it now more than ever, even though it can be hard, uncomfortable, and inconvenient. I like it because of what it offers me during the activity and when I am not active. And I don’t see it as an isolated part of my day, but rather as one link of a continuous chain that occurs from the moment I wake up in the morning to the moment I go to bed at night. Whereas I used to only regard my “scheduled workouts” as having real value, the last couple of decades have transformed my perspective. Just the walk to the drinking fountain is a gift, and also kind of compelling. I wonder where my next movement will lead.

At the beginning of Lent, we were asked to consider the timeless phrase, “Dust you are, and to dust you will return.” It reminds us that at the core of our being, we have been created by God from a cosmos that is built on many principles, one of which is that we are a people of movement, and that deeply ingrained in our biology is a need to move often and regularly as the Lord would have us do.

As we go forward and submit ourselves to our Lenten discipline, all designed to bring us closer to him and his design for us, let us consider that in God’s eyes, the only exercise truly ordained is the exercise of our will to align with his, no matter the minute, hour or day.