Approaching behavior change with clients who want to establish a life-long pursuit of physical fitness, I often categorize exercise under the umbrella term of "physical activity". Before knowing anything about a client, I know there are two primary goals in our training program: 1) to minimize their chance for injury, and 2) to incrementally progress their frequency and consistency with exercise. Arguably the most important factors in accomplishing those two goals is enjoyability, and helping clients find something they look forward to challenging themselves with can be the most influential and impactful way to guide them toward better health.
Also included under that umbrella are five other types of physical activity, all of which need to be carried out in consideration with one another and will have various uses and health benefits. From time to time (like the holiday season or when we've sustained an injury or illness, for example) we may have to adjust priorities and how much time we are investing in each category based on work, family, travel… yadda yadda yadda… life, in general. Knowing when and where to take on the right amount of challenge, when to appropriately increase activity or intensity levels, when to lower intensities to match the stress we’re taking on in other areas of life, and how to maintain our physical activity levels consistently over the life span are the best ways to ensure we're obtaining the long-term health benefits of exercise.
Categories of Physical Activity
1. Daily life activity: work-life activities such as physical labor or chores, "running" errands, and all those movement-based responsibilities that must be taken care of throughout our daily life.
2. Therapeutic exercise: healing, rehabilitation, and reconditioning of the body and/or mind after injury or illness; addressing pain and dysfunction by improving physicality and self-efficacy.
3. Restorative activity: any activity that tends to access the parasympathetic system for relaxation (often dubbed the "Rest, Reset, and Digest system"). Restorative activity elicits calm states of mind, eases stress and discomfort, works to restore functionality after heavy intensity training or physical bouts, or reconditions from highly deconditioned states.
4. Exercise: physical conditioning that requires effort and is carried out in a specific manner to improve global health, physical fitness, and mindset of the entire person.
5. Recreational activity: leisurely activity often done outdoors and undertaken for relaxation or pleasure. Some recreational activity may incorporate a moderate level of competitiveness, but is done primarily for enjoyment.
6. Sport/Competitive activity: activities involving high physical exertion and/or skilled performance as the primary focus, with elements of competition and/or social participation where rules and patterns of behavior governing the activity exist formally.
Why Exercise?
Improving our general physical fitness with exercise is an important part of preparing our bodies to handle stress and perform at higher capacities in all branches of physical activity. Most importantly, we need to be taking on regular, challenging exercise routines to ensure we can lead a fulfilling, pain-free lifestyle with a lower risk of injury and illness. Durability is an amazing thing! NOT having to think about our bodies when we’re going through everyday life can be liberating, which is why it has to become a non-negotiable that we set aside that time to think very intently about our physical fitness during exercise. Down to the cellular level, if we are healthy and fit then our organs and glands, body systems and tissues are as well. Higher levels of fitness also means more resilience and faster recovery when we do encounter uncontrollable injuries or illnesses. The opposite of this is also true; unfit bodies are more susceptible to physical injury as well as physical and even mental illness.
In balance with everything, it’s also important to understand that rest and recovery is a must between higher intensity demands on the body. It isn't always about "progressive overload" and grinding away at ourselves for the next increment of improvement. We have to be continually analyzing and listening to our bodies to gage what our recent stress load has been like outside of the exercise environment to properly self-prescribe the right type of activity that will help bring us back to a level of lower stress, comfortability/equilibrium/calm/happiness, and preparedness for another bout of higher performance. Once we’ve put this self-awareness into practice for a while, the behaviors and the active lifestyle come much more naturally.
A beauty of understanding the term "physical activity" in this manner is that all physical activity can be lend to our weekly volume of movement to improve our durability and health. On the flip side, we can also see how the stress of physical activity can quickly add up to a point that we may be taking too much on our plates. Overtraining and overworking can lead to systemic dysfunction in both our physical and psychological well-being, but it takes a significant amount of intensity to do so. For this reason, the development of self-awareness is a third primary, underlying goal I have for any and every client. It takes lots of practice, some failures, clear communication and feedback, patience, re-analysis, adaptations, and recognizing the incremental improvements to build a kinesthetic (body awareness) tool kit, which is the exact same path to behavior change or creating a new habit.
We'll just keep telling ourselves this is a life-long pursuit of wellness! Trust the process and continue to move forward by incorporating more of the various categories of physical activity into our weekly schedules!
If you're looking for guidance on how to get started with safe and trustworthy exercise routine to compliment your active lifestyle, check out the READY Method self-guided personal training program!
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