Exercise and Recovery

By: Jeffrey Rose

The importance that exercise plays in the health of the individual is now universally recognized. Everyone should be incorporating exercise into their life as a regular part of their life routine. As true as this is, there are special reasons why regular exercise helps those in recovery lead a healthier life. Exercise improves a person’s outlook on life and raises their sense of well being. This eliminates any desire to reach for a drug to artificially improve how you feel in life. Many people have used drugs in the past to compensate for negative feelings. However, if you greatly alleviate, or even totally eliminate these negative feelings, your need to compensate for them with drugs will no longer exist. This is exactly what happens to most people when they embark on and carry through with a program of regular exercise.

When you hear the word “exercise” do you think of it as something that is pleasant or unpleasant, as fun or work? How you feel about exercise plays a role in how often you will do it? Have fun when you exercise because if you are having fun when you exercise, you will automatically find it more pleasant. Focus on how good it feels to move your body. Remember also, if life makes you stressed and tense, exercise automatically releases stress and tension and gives you more energy. You can’t help feeling better about life and yourself too. So think of exercise as a wonderful way to make yourself feel better in just a short amount of time.

If you’re feeling stressed and down, exercising will pick you up and make you feel better and more resourceful. And by releasing stress, you will no longer be drained of energy from stressors and tension creating situations that occur in your daily life. What did you do in the past when you had a stressful day? Did you hurt yourself by doing unhealthy things like overeat, drink, smoke or worse? Now you will be making a conscious choice to do what makes you healthier, while achieving the exact same goals of relieving your daily stress and making yourself better, with fun exercise. You’ll have made a new commitment to yourself to treat yourself better by respecting your physical being and becoming healthier and healthier.

Later on in this article I will discuss an often neglected aspect of the health promoting qualities of exercising, but first I want to discuss what types of exercises are best for you.
The most valuable exercise and the most valuable piece of equipment for doing this exercise is obvious, but usually not known by most personal trainers, who often seem to have a particular favorite regardless of the individual they are advising. It is, to put it succinctly, any exercise that you will enjoy doing regularly. People often ask fitness advisors what piece of equipment they should buy to work out on. Well, the correct answer is the one you will enjoy using and thus will use consistently and regularly. For example one person might enjoy a rowing machine in their home, while another might enjoy a treadmill. While, again, another might enjoy using a climber or stair-like workout piece of equipment. People have different tastes, and that must be recognized and acted upon. Just because your friend has an exercise bike at home, doesn’t mean you should get one instead of say, an elliptical trainer that you would find more fun.

 You know yourself best. You are able to determine they type of program suitable for yourself. For instance, if you think that you need more discipline in helping you kick your addiction, inpatient services would be a good option. Inpatient services offer rigid standards as they are serviced via licensed hospitals. However, this does not mean that other programs are less successful in treating alcoholism, although, the standards would differ.

Of course, you can also get good exercise and fresh air at the same time with an outside exercise such as walking, jogging or biking. However, you should only do these if you enjoy them. Since running can leave some people with wear and tear injury because of its impact nature, walking is more highly recommended because it is much safer.

It might surprise some of you that I believe that strength training is equally as important to good health as aerobic exercise. Doing aerobic exercise can improve the strength of your muscles, but only up to a certain point because a particular aerobic exercise will provide only so much resistance, so that after awhile, you are only maintaining the muscle you have already developed and not building any more muscle. The value of strength training for the health of every individual is becoming more and more recognized in the fitness world. It is now accepted that working out with heavy resistance provides benefits far beyond just being stronger and looking better.

Today using heavier resistance, moving at very very slow tempos, in both directions, and quickly reaching the point of failure, when you just cannot move the resistance any longer, is considered the best form of strength training. At the moment when your body tries but cannot overcome and move the resistance any longer, your muscle will signal your body to stimulate muscle growth to increase your muscle’s strength, and also improve the metabolic functions employed in the use of your muscles, so that any future challenge can be more easily met. Maintaining a slow rate of movement in both directions eliminates the effects of momentum, and counters the effects of gravity as the weight inside the workout machine is being lowered. This system of slow training with heavy resistance creates a more intense and productive workout while lessening any potential injury to the body, both through the very slow speed of movement and the reduced number of repetitions. This is the form of strength training I recommend, both to achieve the results you desire and protect you from any injuries. Because of the large increase of the resistance you will be dealing with, this method of working out is best done only using exercise machines, rather them free weights. In addition, proper form must be maintained at all times, both to prevent injury and insure you will get a proper workout that will provide all the benefits that are intended. When people hurry through their strength training by doing many rushed repetitions instead of going slowly, and jerk the weight, twist their body, clench their teeth and hold their breath, they are doing wrong things that will only keep them from making good progress in a safe way. I want to further reiterate that no matter what type of weight training you do, it is essential that you breathe freely and never ever hold your breath.

But more importantly, in regard to our present discussion on detoxification during recovery, this bouncing activity, running or jumping on a rebounder, effectively moves and recycles the lymph within the lymphatic system. In the end, it is very effective for detoxification and for continuing to keep your body in a cleaner less toxic state.

Those of you who have not been exercising and keeping your body in the best of health are going to be surprised and delighted with how much better you will be feeling and enjoying life when you have a stronger body and you are getting a lot of health enhancing exercise.

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