Exercise + Life

In this edition, I remind you why you exercise.

The Rundown

Fit Cult will be on hiatus until mid-January. But before I sign off for 2023, I wanted to do something a little different with this edition and highlight how exercise shapes you far beyond the gym.

It’s often easy to forget the ways your commitment to fitness shows up in other areas of your life so here are some points to remember, especially on those days when it all feels too hard:

• Pushing yourself physically helps you learn how to embrace uncomfortable situations.

• When your brain is telling you to stop (hello, Tabata!) and you don’t, you are improving your self-control and willpower.

• With the improved self-control and willpower you gain from undertaking and enduring exercise challenges, you will tend to perform better in hard, yet seemingly unrelated areas of life like quitting a bad habit or remaining calm during a stressful situation.

• Exercise is sometimes called a “keystone” habit because of these positive spillover benefits. People who start working out decrease stress, smoking, alcohol and caffeine consumption, increase healthy eating and even do a better job at managing their finances.

• Physically pushing yourself also helps you learn how to see stress as a challenge and strengthens your social ties so that you can foster the inner resources you need to effectively confront stress in all areas of your life. You become a more resilient person in the process.

• Put another way, through endurance activities, you are learning to see yourself as someone who can decide to engage in hard things, get through them and evolve in important ways.

• The good news is you don’t have to be an elite athlete or exercise nonstop to reap the benefits. You just have to do something that is physically challenging for you.

• When you are developing physical fitness, you are developing life fitness too.

Sourced from: YLMSportScience, The Growth Equation’s Brad Stulberg, Kelly McGonigal, New York and Outside magazines, the International Journal of Sports and Exercise Medicine, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology and PLoS ONE.