Do you know the science-power behind simple exercise?

“If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.”
– Martin Luther King Jr.

My friend was a very unsatisfied and unhappy person back then, it was almost more than a decade ago.
I knew that he had a family tragedy, his mother died at age sixty seven due to heart disease.
He used to think personally that he is the most difficult and arrogant human being on the earth but for his family and friends, he was amiable and very helpful.
“Worst of all, for me, I was a procrastinating lazy dude in my personal affairs,” he told me.

“I had no knowledge of differentiation between important and urgent activities in my life.
I would give hours to others without thinking about my health and well being, I never had any idea of the intangible value of life, for example, long term personal health and prosperity,” he further added.

One day, at night, all of a sudden, something unexpected happened to him.
At midnight, he’d walk from one corner of his bedroom to another corner to watch his surroundings.
He said “don’t ask why? I don’t know.
Sometimes, this happens to everybody’s life.”
He saw his wife in deep sleep, his only daughter back then surrounded by her stuffed animals with her favorite Dora the explorer.
Peeking through the window, he saw a quiet dark night outside, all were good outside, all were in deep sleep inside, he felt that his wife and his daughter were happy and, most importantly, very safe.
His mind whispered, “you have everything you could possibly have at the moment, yet you are completely failing to appreciate it.”

The following morning turned out to be different from his usual mornings.
He committed himself that he would change, he didn’t know how but he would change everything, his health, his mindset, his thinking, and most importantly, his habits, the root cause.
The first thing he would change is his health status which was at the moment very poor.
Every morning he would start his day with some minor physical exercise so that he would renew his body early in the morning for the day, a new and fresh day every single day.

Dr. Ernest Becker, PhD, author of  “The Denial of Death” says that death is life’s ultimate motivator, that what gives us a sense of meaning and purpose in our lives is an attempt to create something that will outlive us when we die.

Triggers for mind and habit change

“From that day forward, I started to work and think of my life as a matrix,” he said.
He didn’t pay much attention to what others were saying, though he gradually became a good listener but always made decisions by himself.
He developed some fundamental and tacit knowledge about his life, his health, and his family.
“I learned to know the value of my people around me, and I began to take these different components of life and synthesize them into a coherent whole. I got a clear picture of me and the rest of my life,” he said.

It was a cold morning, he saw some ants on the floor, and realized how they were sharing information with each other.
He would relate that to how he should share information around his close friends and family members.
He visualized how bees colonize and compare what would happen if all families colonize in the same way as bees.
He compared his mind with a pure glittering diamond to view the world.

“I have read that a diamond that has the most glitter has fifty six different angles, so I have to look at something from many different perspectives.
I needed some mental training in my mind but personal habit comes first to check who we are and where we stand,” he added.

First, he changed one very bad habit of spending hours on the phone before and after bed scrolling about people who have zero to negligible influence in his life.

James Clear, an author of “Atomic Habits” says “it’s not sufficient to simply change our behavior, but we also have to change how we see ourselves and how we relate to others.”

He almost stopped using his phone in the bedroom. His whole health was affected by poor sleep in different ways.
“I didn’t need LED or any light in the bedroom because it delayed the release of melatonin, a sleep signaling hormone.
I needed darkness to release melatonin for my good night sleep, a key component of a healthy lifestyle,” he commented.

Remember, melatonin is a hormone created by the pineal gland in the brain that’s released directly into the bloodstream.
Darkness initiates the pineal gland to start producing melatonin but light causes it to stop.
“By adopting good night sleep, we can create more focus in our own life rather than focusing on someone else’s pictures on facebook and instagram because focus creates change.
If we gradually measure the different components of our life we always see noticeable improvements,” my friend added.

Second, he completely changed his sitting habit.
His BMI, body mass index, was still in the normal range but moving beyond the upper range of 25.
He remembered his mother and her heart disease which was somehow also associated with obesity.
So, he decided to be more of a moving figure, a person of movement.
He would even start reading a book or watching a movie and walk at the same time in the living room.
Once he starts talking on the phone, he would start walking simultaneously.
“I would read fifteen pages without stopping walking, I would feel so much clarity in my mind that led to my clear thinking pattern and subsequently the productivity skyrocketed.
I would remind you of the saying, sitting is the new smoking,” he added.

Science behind exercise

Pretty quickly, he learned the chemistry behind physical exercise and why he was having more clarity in his mind.
Do you know physical exercise motivates our body and mind in positive thinking?
For those of you who still are not clear about this powerful science or you know but don’t practice, I’m telling you the secret sauce, exercise does amazing things for our body chemically.

When we start to exercise, our body makes an important chemical called adenosine monophosphate (AMP).
It informs our entire body that we are exercising, this internal communication is key and very powerful.
This chemical causes muscle cells, brain cells, and liver cells to break down stored glycogen and fat to use as energy.

A simple exercise not only improves the health of many vital organs like the heart, it increases the blood flow to our brain, improving our cognitive ability.
Once we develop the habit of exercise, we gradually change the quality of our life mentally, emotionally, physically, and even sexually.
We change everything from our sense of awareness to attractiveness and our sense of power to health and vitality.

My friend was very weak from many angles from a health perspective.
His doctor said his bone density degraded pretty badly even though he was not even 30.
For most of us, bone density peaks by age 30.
Once we hit 40, we begin to lose up to 5% of our bone density each decade.

His cardiovascular system was very weak, he could feel that while running for a few minutes.
He started to learn about life, vitality, health, and endurance.
“If I’m not taking care of my body, exercising and eating healthy foods, I can suffer gradual heart failure or a sudden heart attack,” he said.

In his reading, he found an eye-popping scary fact about cardiovascular disease.
Cardiovascular disease is the number one killer, one American dies every 36 seconds from it.
Globally, one out of five people die from heart disease, more than any other disease on the planet, 18 million deaths per year and 50 thousand deaths everyday.
Research shows the amazing thing about heart is that simply walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can cut the risk of dying from a heart attack in half.

Heart disease and stem cells

Can you guess why so many people die from heart disease?
Because, the heart is the least regenerative organ in our body, meaning there are no stem cells in the heart.
What does it mean?
Stem cells are used for regrowth in all kinds of tissue repair, they have regenerative in the body.

In general, the native stem cells are also known as mesenchymal precursor cells, the body’s most versatile and potent building blocks.
They differentiate into bone, cartilage, muscle or fat whatever we need.
After an injury, they are crucial for two reasons: they keep inflammation normal and they repair damaged tissue.

The problem is that stem cells grow scarcer with age especially with people of chronic disease.
The other bigger problem of the heart is that the heart can’t heal itself on its own after an injury like a heart attack.
Let me tell you why.
Our heart contains 6 or 7 billion heart muscle cells.
If we have a serious heart attack and are lucky enough to survive, we can lose more than one billion of those cells.
The heart can not replace them, so it never replaces their ability to function either.
Ultimately, the problem becomes severe, that is why it’s the world’s leading cause of death.

Dr. Stephen Hussey, DC, an author of “Understanding the Heart” says, “We cannot hope to successfully understand and address modern chronic diseases without evaluating them in the context of a toxic modern world.”

Conclusion

The good news is that prevention is the single best defense against heart disease and many other life threatening diseases.

Therefore, this is worth repeating one more time: just walking 20 to 30 minutes everyday can cut the risk of dying from a heart attack in half.
Remember, this is research proven published data.

One more thing regarding cardiovascular disease.
One natural therapy called sauna or hot shower, is very effective for cardiovascular disease.
This actually started for my dear friend personally because in one of his health issues, modern medicines didn’t work.
The reality is our body is so complex that sometimes doctors couldn’t figure out the cause of the problem despite visiting many specialists.
One of the habits that he developed is getting in the sauna or hot shower because he noticed the improvement.
At that time he was using primarily a hot shower but a little longer shower probably 15 to 20 minutes.

I will take you a little deeper in the science of sauna and what actually happens chemically.
Sauna generates heat stress responses within the body, including the activation of heat shock proteins.
This protein family is produced by our cells in response to stressful conditions, such as excessive heat and are important to many cellular processes.
It regulates the cell cycle, cellular signaling, and functioning of the immune system.
By adopting a sauna at least 4 to 7 days per week at at least 73 degree celsius, our risk for cardiovascular diseases or any premature deaths decreases significantly.
We also reduce the risk of cognitive disorders like dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, skin disease, depression, and stroke.

“We must be the CEO of our own health and body, we have to educate ourselves and make solid independent decisions for our well being and longevity.
Remember, in reality, who we are is what we do in our free time and what we eat normally,” my dear friend added.

Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.