Finding the motivation for exercise...(part 2)
In this second part of our blog about getting motivated for exercise, we look at the impact that technology has had on us and why it’s even more important to get out and get a sweat on!
Professor Scott Galloway in his book “The Algebra of Happiness”, observes that the ratio of how much a person spends sweating (exercising) verses watching others sweating (watching sport on tv), is a good forward-looking indicator to how successful that person will be in life. Just let that sink in for a minute!
As a race, we humans have never been more sedentary than today! We have developed technologies to take the strain of most of our daily tasks, cars, washing machines, dishwashers, online shopping to name a few. We also use technology to entertain ourselves (tv, computers, games consoles etc) which mostly requires us to be sitting down! In our place of work, we use technology to do the heavy lifting, meaning we’re all doing less physical work.
Because of this it is even more important that we incorporate exercise into our lives, maybe even over and above previous generation’s levels, to compensate for the reduced physical activity we do in our daily lives.
Technology isn’t all bad, it has also provided us with the highest amount of leisure time of any previous generation, so we actually have more time to exercise! We have specific clothing designed and developed to keep us warm and dry specifically when exercising, we have the ability to ride our bike indoors with apps like Zwift (others are available) helping to make a stationary exercise session more interesting (and competitive), we have exercise tracking gadgets (Garmin, Wahoo, Apple Watch to name a few) to monitor our progress every step of the way, we even have Strava to get motivated and inspired by what our friends are doing.
To sum up……exercise can help you with both your physical and mental health, is a good forward-looking indicator to future success and gives you a natural immediate feel good effect. Technology is also allowing us more free time in which to exercise and helping us exercise in smarter ways by bringing the outdoors inside with turbo trainers, running machines, rowing machines. By analysing the data captured by wearable tech we are now able to identify the most efficient ways for us to exercise.
So really there isn’t any excuse why we aren’t exercising more as we have the tech, the clothes, the know-how, the time and at the end of the day skin is waterproof !!!!