 In this episode of Mind Pump the World's Top Ranked Fitness, Health, and Entertainment podcast, we talk about why everybody should exercise. Now, if you're a fitness fanatic, you might think to yourself, well, duh, everybody should exercise, but believe it or not, only 22% of Americans exercise regularly. The rest of them don't, and they need to be convinced. This is a great episode to share with friends or family who need to get started, who you think need to get started with an exercise routine. So we listed 10 scientifically proven reasons why everyone should exercise. You'll love this episode. Now, this episode is brought to you by our sponsor Zbiotics. Now, Zbiotics is the world's first genetically modified probiotic supplement. So it's the first one that's modified to literally help you break down the wasteful byproducts of alcohol consumption. In other words, you drink Zbiotics, then you drink alcohol. The probiotics produce enzymes that break down the negative byproducts of alcohol, meaning you wake up the next day and you feel way better. In fact, me and my co-host tested this out ourselves. We did a drinking game, took Zbiotics beforehand. I fully expected to feel dead the next day. And remarkably, I felt pretty damn good. The stuff is weird. It really does work. No joke. And because you listen to Mind Pump, you get a discount. Here's what you do. Go to Zbiotics.com. That's Z-B-I-O-T-I-C-S.com forward slash Mind Pump. Get 10% off your first order. Also, I want to let you guys know that we create fitness programs that help people achieve amazing levels of fitness. Build muscle, burn body fat, speed up their metabolism. Well, this month, we took two of our most popular programs, MAPS Anabolic, a full-body workout program, and the No BS Six Pack Formula, which is our AB and core training program, both very, very popular. We combined them both and slashed the price. Okay? So normally, you'd enroll in both of them. It would come out to like $170 or $180. Right now, you get both lifetime access for one payment of $59.95. That's it. Get MAPS Anabolic and the No BS Six Pack Formula for $59.99. Just go to MAPSOctober.com. That's M-A-P-S-October.com. Justin, you were doing some Googling. I'm a big Googler. What were you Googling? Yeah, I was just looking up. I'm trying to see what your average person is looking up in terms of fitness-related topics or just help and advice in terms of anything health-related. So one of the main things that stood out to me was what are the benefits of exercising at all? For somebody, just your average person who just wants to maybe eat right or just is concerned with their job and maintaining their family life and whatnot. Why should they exercise? What are the benefits to it? That's good. And I think we should probably clarify the difference between exercise and being active. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's really important because there's definitely benefits to just moving and being active. But what we're talking about is a little bit more structured, a little bit more individualized. It's exercise. Exercise being something that you, because being active is very important, but exercise is also important where you actually have something planned. You know what you're doing. You train your individual body specifically for things that you want to focus on and work on for yourself. Well, when Justin first said this to me, I thought, oh, that's been silly. Like, why, you know, like we're too vague. Yeah, right. But when I think about like the clients that I had and their family members and stuff, you know, we all know that what the statistics are as far as like how obesity is on the rise. And there's a lot of people that are really out of shape. But there's also a large portion of the population that don't exercise on a regular basis, but still maintain their weight. You know, they make better food choices. They're aware of maybe like what they put in their body, and they don't really give a shit about looking super muscular or buff. They don't care much about aesthetics. And they just want to be healthy. And they've done that through basically making good food choices and staying active to your point, Sal. But don't really exercise. And what is the case for that person and why they should exercise? Well, actually, it's funny because we do get stuck in a little bit of a bubble, right? Because when I hear, you know, like, hey, we should do a podcast about why everyone should exercise, I think. Why? Everybody knows you should exercise. But I just looked it up. So statistically speaking, under 25% of Americans meet the recommended amount of daily activity. So we're not even talking about actual structured exercise, but rather just being active, right? That's under 20 something percent. A smaller percentage of that or a percentage of that small percentage number of those people are actually doing exercise or actually working out. So you're absolutely right, Adam. The vast majority of people in America, not to mention the world, you do need to make the case for them why they should, why should you exercise? What are the benefits? What are the costs of not doing it? Why is this so important? Well, also, it reminds me of when we were researching apps and we were researching ways to, you know, make an experience for somebody who wouldn't normally just get up and move around. Like the big emphasis in the tech world is really about just getting people to stand more. That's what they've reduced it down to just because even, even just because of the modern comforts and the way that like work is structured, like sitting down. It's so easy. It's so accessible. You really have to go out of your way to, you know, just stand and move around and walk. And so they're trying to really focus just on the very simplistic things of how often are you walking? Like how often are you standing? And then they're gauging those as metrics. But now we're not even really at the point of bringing exercise in that conversation, which I feel is even more of a crucial step to then, you know, making their lives even that much more optimized. Yeah. Well, life in modern societies is sedentary. We've designed it this way. We used to suffer from pain and problems and health issues related to, you know, not having maybe enough nutrition or enough food and being and life being too hard, you know, washing clothes. I remember one year as a kid, I went to visit family in Sicily and my grandmother and remember this is they're not very, you know, well off. They're in Sicily and she had this old, like water bin with the what is it called the rack that you scrub clothes on with the soap or whatever the washboard. And I said, what is this? I don't know anything. And she said, oh, this is how we used to wash clothes. So I had her show me washing clothes took up a lot of time and energy and it was a lot of energy. I couldn't believe how physical that kind just washing clothes was. Everything was like that. Everything we did was very physical, very active, hard. And so we suffered a lot of issues from this, a lot of pain, a lot of posture issues, people with humpbacks and people with injuries and joint inflammation as a result of really, really hard labor. So we solved a lot of that. But now we have the opposite problem or consequences from the opposite, which is if you just go about your daily life in modern societies, you are lucky if you get a few thousand steps a day, not even talking about hard physical movement or activity, just steps, a few thousand. I mean, you could get that with like a 30 minute walk, essentially, or an hour minute, you know, an hour walk out of your entire day, let alone doing anything else that requires reaching up above your head and lifting something and twisting. We literally sit down most of the day. And so like you said, Justin, a lot of what they're doing is better than nothing. It's like damage control, but it's not anywhere near optimal, not even close. Yeah, it's still like really reinforcing this reactive mentality. And I think that, you know, that's, that's one of those things where if I'm, if I'm just doing my normal everyday thing, it's, it really takes an extra step, which a lot of people just, they don't really want to consider doing more to what they already feel might be a bit challenging for them. But introducing challenge is what, you know, makes you stronger, is what, you know, makes your body healthier and, and your mind sharper. Well, we've speculated that this is the reason of the rise of interest in obstacle course racing. When we've talked about this, I think that people subconsciously know this. Like I don't, I think there's a large portion of people that sign up for these races, and they don't realize what it is that draws them to that. I mean, if you think about how absurd they are, you know, that we, you pay money to go run up dirt hills, carry rocks, swimming cold lakes, you know, climb obstacles. It's like, this is all things that you could do or you had to do a few hundred years ago just to get, just to get by your normal day. You're paying to do it. Yeah. And, and so I do think that it's, it's, it's in us, right? To gravitate towards these things, because we, we subconsciously know that it's beneficial for us. And I think that is a reason why we see a rise in these obstacle course racing, all the different organizations that are out there is, I think deep down, people do know this. It's just, we have to make that case for the average person that maybe looks at themself in the mirror, and they don't think themselves is really overweight. They feel all right. The doctor's not telling them they have to do anything extra. They manage maybe their calories. And so they assume, why do I need to exercise? Why do I need to spend hours in my day doing exercises in a gym or outside with, I think that I'm healthy, right? Yeah. Yeah. And you know, there's a saying in advertising, and I promise this applies to what we're talking about, but there's a saying in advertising where you want to get to a point where you're trading dimes for quarters, meaning I want to spend $1,000 on advertising. And if I can make $1,500 for every $1,000 I invest in advertising, well, now I can grow my business and whatever, right? With exercise, it's kind of like that. The time that you spend on exercising, you get back in terms of quality of life in terms of length of life, you live longer, you live better, and you get more out of things and you get better experiences out of the things that you do. So it is a very worthwhile investment because there is some time that you need to invest in exercising, but it is trading dimes for quarters. So what we're going to do is we're going to go through 10 scientifically proven benefits of structure to exercise. These are benefits that we're not speculating as trainers that these are proven beyond a shadow of a doubt have been shown to get these kinds of benefits from structured exercise. Now, the first one, this is an interesting one because for a long time we observed this, but there wasn't any studies to support this. And that is that exercise generally makes you happy. It generally improves your mood. We now have studies to show that exercise done properly is as effective in the moderate term as SSRI antidepressant drugs for treating mild to moderate, which is the most common forms of depression. Now, these same studies show that exercise is probably better for the long term because you just continue to improve. That's for treating mild to moderate forms of depression, but if you're just average, you don't necessarily suffer from depression, studies also show that structured exercise improves your outlook on life. And this is why this is number one in this list that we're going to go through, how you perceive everything around you changes everything. If your day in your life doesn't change at all, but you now are happier in it, you now perceive it as better, your entire life has changed. You know what I'm saying? What's that saying? Like rather than trying to carpet the world, put carpets on the bottom of your feet, right? So rather than trying to change your whole life to make yourself feel better, why not just make yourself feel better? And then your whole life is now totally different. Now, on a physiological point, what's going on? Is it the blood, oxygen, nutrients that's being circulated through the body? Is it the serotonin? Like what is causing us to actually chemically feel happier? Well, exercise does increase the production of norepinephrine, epinephrine, catecholamines. It changes the brain to perceive and handle stress and anxiety better. So literally, as you exercise, they've done studies that show that the structure of the brain changes so that you perceive stress and anxiety differently, and they become far less stressful and anxious. Is that the body's ability to adapt to this stress? You're putting this out, you're putting this stress on the body by exercising. It then gets better and adapts to it. Therefore, it will make all stress easier for you to handle. Yes. Your body literally, just like your muscles grow from exercise, and we'll get into that as well, you literally are training your body to feel happier. This is why, in study after study after study, exercise is the most consistent thing you can do to improve your mood. There is nothing that consistently across the board, children, men, women, old, young, disabled or able-bodied, exercise improved. If it's done properly and appropriately, it's a real important thing that you need to say, it improves basically how you perceive everything. It literally makes you happy. It seems that when you hone in on that balance with the body's required, energy-wise and expenditure-wise, the body rewards itself with chemicals, it rewards, it elevates your mood. If you look at your body as this machine that has all these inner workings, that has this hydraulic system in it, it has all these plumbing that needs to, you need to supply the right work for everything to come in and out properly, and your body will respond accordingly and reward you for using it. Well, your body is the filter that receives the signals from the world, perceives them, that includes your brain, and if it's healthy, think about it this way. Here's an extreme example. Think of when you're sick. How often are you happy when you're sick? You tend to feel a little bit more depressed and down because you physically feel depressed and down. They both affect each other. Right. Exercise physically makes your body feel better, which then mentally makes you feel, and emotionally makes you more likely to experience happiness. What they find is that people who exercise regularly perceive happiness to be stronger, or feelings that aren't like happiness to be stronger, and perceive negative emotions to be weaker. So things that normally would make me feel really anxious or sad now make me feel less so because I exercise regularly. Now, the next one, this is one that a lot of people are familiar with, but exercise, regular exercise, especially resistance training, makes fat loss a lot easier. In fact, we now have lots of studies that show that just diet alone is a terrible way to burn mostly body fat. In fact, just dieting causes a muscle and fat loss effect. So you lose weight, but you end up losing muscle, and diet alone is hard to maintain fat loss because as you lose muscle, you slow your metabolism down, which then makes it harder to maintain. Well, this also goes back to discerning between just activity and exercise because one is more beneficial towards actually building muscle, which then if we are able to build more muscle on our body, then it becomes even more easy to shuttle and utilize this fat storage appropriately. Well, it also gives you a lot more flexibility in your diet and now, right? During these times when the average person is extremely sedentary, when we have all kinds of food that can be delivered to us, most people that are even contemplating whether they should or should not exercise probably indulge in things like wine or desserts or things that they enjoy that are pleasurable that most of us like. And when you exercise, it gives you a lot more flexibility to have these things occasionally into your diet versus I don't want to exercise. So I have to have this very regimen way of eating all the time to maintain a healthy weight. Right. And when you do reduce your calories, if you don't send a signal to your body that says you need muscle, what your body tries to do is slow its metabolism down to meet the calories that you're eating. So you cut your calories, you lose some weight, half of its muscle, half of its fat that's supported by many studies. That's typically the ratio of weight loss. So you lost 10 pounds, five fat, five muscle, and now the amount of food that you're eating that caused the weight losses, now the amount of food you need to eat to maintain because your metabolism has now slowed down. So if you've ever gone on a diet and said to yourself, I can't wait for this diet to be over because I'm eating so little, this can be very difficult to maintain. Well, guess what? Unless you build muscle, you specifically build muscle, that's gonna be the calories you're gonna be stuck with forever. And that's a very difficult situation to be in. Structured exercise, in particular resistance training, will speed up a metabolism by 300 calories as much as 1,000 or 1,500. I've seen people's metabolism go way up from resistance training. So now here you are leaner and you can eat more. Now to maintain your leaner body, you can eat more. That's a much easier, better position to be in long term. The next one, again, this one seems obvious, but a lot of people don't realize this, but exercise, and again, specifically resistance training, phenomenal for muscle, excellent for bones. Now let's talk about muscle for a second. Muscle, your body views your muscle primarily to get you to move around and to perform the daily tasks that you need to perform. Your body will never make you stronger than it thinks you need to be. That's a waste of energy, right? Muscle burns a lot of calories and we evolved for the most part where we didn't have lots of food. So your body fights having more muscle unless it thinks it needs to. Like why would I think about it this way? Your body isn't going to make you have a higher metabolism or have a higher liability with calories unless it's something that it thinks is going to be beneficial. And working out sends that signal that tells the body we need more muscle. So now you have more muscle, which improves mobility, decreases your risk of injury, protects you against things like diabetes. You have better blood sugar control. And then because muscle connects the bone or attaches a bone, you have stronger bones. And we are in a bit of an epidemic of osteopenia and osteoporosis. It's still climbing, especially in women. Resistance training or exercise, structured exercise is the only thing to consistently reverse that trend. This is a good place to talk about that where you start with that too, right? So again, if you're one of those people that is listening to this and debating whether you should exercise or not exercise, I think one of the common mistakes that I have found with this person who now decides, okay, let's say they go through all these 10 points here. Okay, I'm sold. I'm exercising now. And they think they got to go into this crazy routine or program. If you weren't doing very much exercise or any at all to begin with, just simply doing a day or two in the week of exercise is already going to start to send a signal to the body that it needs to build some muscle and getting the benefits of fat loss and speeding metabolism like the point Sal is making right now. So starting off slow, but yet being consistent is far better off than you throwing a ton of it at your body right away and less likely to continue it on. No, do it the right way. That's why I keep saying appropriate exercise, the appropriate amount of exercise is what's going to give you all these benefits that we're talking about going too hard or too long for your individual body. Remember, it's all for you, right? So don't look at someone else and say what, you know, I'm going to do what they're doing, because it seems you've working for them. If it's wrong for you, you're not going to get a lot of these benefits. Now the next one is interesting because and I remember, you know, talking to one of my uncles about this one a long time ago and he's like, this doesn't make any sense, but exercise actually increases your energy levels, which is if you think about it kind of doesn't make sense because you think, how can making myself tired, sweating and working out give me more energy? You know, it's like weird energy physics, the more energy I burn, the more energy I have that doesn't make any sense. Well, it is totally true study support this 100% across the board. But here's how it works, very similar to how the body builds muscle when you're exercising. Your body will only give you the amount of muscle that you need, that it thinks you need. So if you're lifting weights, you'll have more muscle. If you're not lifting weights, you'll be weaker. Okay, your body's only going to produce the amount of energy that things you need. So if you sit around all day long and you're not active and you're not exercising or working out, your body's only going to produce so much energy. You don't need much energy because you just sit around all day long. If you do structured exercise, structured workouts, well now your body's like we need to produce more energy. We need to produce more energy because the demands on us are much higher. Well, yeah, I'm trying to like think of how I can relate this to somebody who just thinks about their job, just thinks about, you know, managing their home life and everything else is sort of in between. Well, if you just think of your work and let's say you're starting a new job or like a new focus within that job, and there's a learning curve to that. And what you have to do is immerse yourself in that and learn each part of the steps so you can get more efficient at that, but also you're stretching yourself. So like, let's say the work speed, I have to get something turned in like quicker, and I have to get better at the way that I manage my time and my efforts, you know, in my job to produce this result. You know, you got to think of training your body to be able to stretch your capacity a bit more, to be able to achieve that part where now I have more energy because I've been training my body to try to stretch itself to gain more access to it. I also think it's a bit of a momentum builder. Like it took me a long time to really start to notice this in my own behaviors, right? So obviously there's many days when I come home and I haven't worked out. Like I don't work out every single day and I noticed there's this, this direct correlation with the days that I exercise and the days that I don't. And that's this is when I come home and it's been a long day at work, we sit in here on the podcast, we're on computers on our phones all day. And then I come home from a normal day and I haven't exercised. I have this tendency to want to continue sitting the rest of the day. I go home and then I want to lay on the couch and then maybe Katrina says something like, oh, hon, would you go get that down the garage? Well, I have a three level house plus a garage and he does four levels, right? And she'll say something like get something in the garage. And I'm like, ugh, I grumble to get up to go down four flights of stairs as if it's like so much work for me to go down there. You know, it takes me a whole two and a half minutes to do it at most, right? Yeah. And then I then I recognize the days where I get exercised and I come in and I almost feel guilty for sitting down. I don't want to sit down. My body wants to keep moving and keep working. And I, you know, something like she asked the same type of a question like that where she needs something downstairs and I just fly downstairs and grab it and run back up or I find myself coming behind her and helping out and doing chores around the house because I feel productive. I already exercised for the day. My energy levels are up and it tends to promote more movement through the day. It took me a long time to connect those dots, but most people that I've shared that with and told them to watch and evaluate that in their own lives have found the exact same thing too. When you get that exercise in, it tends to promote more energy and more movement through the rest of the day. Well, I'm back to your previous point before this about like the right dose, about not like overdoing it. There is a way to provide stimulus to your body to exercise in a way where you don't get insanely exhausted, where you feel like you're so sore. And I know that's a big deterrent for a lot of people are new to working out. They think immediately I'm going to get incredibly sore. I don't like that feeling and so why should I do that? Well, there's a way to do that where you provide just enough stimulus to the muscles where they're going to respond and actually it's going to elevate your energy levels. Yeah, you should feel good after working out. You should finish your workout and feel really good, calm, have good energy. You should not feel like you need to go lay down on the couch and take an app. You probably overdid it. But again, it's literally like this. Look, if you a few days a week are lifting 100 or 200 pounds, and your body gets strong to be able to do that, how easy is it going to be to lift your kid, you know, who weighs 25 pounds? How easy is it going to be for you to lift the bag of dog food that's 15 pounds, right? If you are expending energy through exercise and your body is adapting and getting better at that so that you can do an hour workout, how good are you going to feel when you just need to walk to your desk and sit at your computer and focus on your computer screen, right? Your body is producing the amount of energy that it thinks you need to be active. And at the moment, you don't need to be active, but you've got all this extra energy. So exercise consistently done properly increases energy levels and obviously who couldn't want more energy. The next one, this is a big one for modern societies because although we've solved a lot of, you know, acute health issues, we've seen the rise of chronic health issues. So now we see people with diabetes on the rise. That's a chronic health issue. We have autoimmune issues are on the rise, Alzheimer's, dementia on the rise, all these chronic health issues and really our current medicine has a tough time treating. You know, we can kind of handle the symptoms, but we can't cure them. You know, it's not like you take antibiotics for an infection and it's gone. You're kind of managing the symptoms. Well, exercise, structured exercise has been shown across the board to reduce the risk of all of these chronic diseases. In some cases has been shown to reverse them. You know, I've worked with clients who were just became diabetic and came and hired me. And then for all intents and purposes, doctors said, well, it looks like you're not diabetic anymore. Let's just keep doing what you're doing. So because of the way it strengthens the body improves its health, the chronic disease risk dramatically lowers. Now, do you think a lot of that has to do too with just the partitioning of calories? Because most people in modern society tend to over-consume a majority of the time, even if you're pretty good with your diet and kind of balance it out through the week and have some lower calorie days. For the most part, most people are over-consuming. And then the fact that you're exercising those calories instead of getting stored as body fat or slowing things up or contributing to the chronic disease, it's now being partitioned over for energy, fuel, and resources maybe to hang on to muscle. Well, you're going to be leaner. It's easier to stay lean. You have more muscle. Muscle increases insulin sensitivity, which is great for preventing diabetes and Alzheimer's. You have a better inflammatory response in the body, which can help with lots of autoimmune issues. Of course, your outlook changes. Your mental state can even affect your body's risk of getting chronic diseases. I mean, across the board, again, studies show that one of the best things you could do, for example, to reduce risk of all cause mortality or all these chronic health issues is just to have structured workouts really beyond a shadow of a doubt. It's been proven time and time again. The next one, this is an interesting one, but there's a lot of science that supports this as well, and that's that it can help skin health. Now, like the energy one that we talked about, you think to yourself, well, I know working out makes you sweat. It produces free radicals. Like how is that supposed to help skin? Well, if you do it right, your body starts to also produce more antioxidants. It starts to produce better compounds for your skin. It also balances out hormones. And so exercise has been shown in studies to positively influence someone's skin the way it looks and the way it feels. Now, is this another one of those cases where the amount and the intensity that you do it is important? It's got to be appropriate, right? So like overdoing it, it may not be very healthy for the skin, but the right dosage of exercise can be extremely healthy. Absolutely. Because if you get in that rut of just thinking that running or walking or like repetitive patterns is going to solve a lot of these issues, you may actually be creating more issues down the road in terms of utilizing your oxygen and circulation effectively. Well, that's the reason why I brought it up, because the first thing that came to mind when you said that Sal was that I was picturing somebody who was like a marathon runner, and I don't think they have great skin. No, many times they don't. Now, you have to consider if you overdo it, you're going to get, you're not going to get a lot of these things that we're talking about. And then of course, there's also consider somebody who trains a lot outdoors may get more sun exposure, more wind exposure. So you can't, it's a hard thing to compare. But when they control for all these factors, and they look at appropriate levels of exercise, you tend to see across the board improvements in skin as well. Skin just looks more supple, less wrinkled. It's healthier, skin cancer rates go down from being from exercising. So just across the board, it's one of those things like you want better scan, do some structured exercise. Now the next one, this one's also real important, especially we have an because we have an aging population here in America. Structured exercise is amazing for the brain. It's incredible for the brain. There's all kinds of cognitive benefits that they've shown and just the retention and memory and just improvements on focus, especially I think focus was the big one that you know, I was researching in terms of like exercise, helping to promote that's that's one of the the biggest things we're fighting right now is like where our focus lies. We're so distractible today with all the technologies and things in front of us to be able to really hone in and focus and get your body to exercise and get all this out so we can remain in that state is highly beneficial for all across the board in terms of home, life, work, life, etc. Yeah, well your brain utilizes, you know, sugar for energies to run, utilizes other forms of energy too, but it also utilizes sugars. And when your brain has trouble utilizing the sugar, it, you know, some scientists call it type three diabetes, also known as things like Alzheimer's or dementia. In fact, when you take someone who's got Alzheimer's and you put them on a ketogenic diet, sometimes they see improvements in performance because the brain now is operating with less sugar. Now that's more of a bandaid than anything. But how about increasing your insulin sensitivity so that doesn't happen in the first place? Well, exercise does that, especially when you build muscle, right? The more muscle you have, the better your body responds to sugar and the more sensitive it becomes to insulin. Exercise also causes spikes in brain-derived neurotropic factor. This is like miracle growth for the brain. And in older populations, they show that regular exercise maintains hippocampus size and strength and health, which is great for things like memory. Well, what about just the communication factor? I mean, before you wiggle your fingers or stand or sit or do any sort of movement, the very first thing that initially happens is you get a signal from the brain, that communication for those fingers to move or for those legs to contract, like, you know, just exercising is improving that connection and improving that communication. And the lack of it, just like muscle, it'll atrophy itself. So, you know, think of it that way too. I want to continue to strengthen that communication to all parts of my body. And that's what you start to see. That's the first thing that starts to go when you see people age. It's not necessarily, oh, they just, they get old and then the bones get brittle and the muscle gets weak. It first starts with the lack of communication. Yeah, the more neural connections you make, the stronger the brain. Exactly. Oh, yeah. If you stopped moving your legs, the parts of the brain that control the legs start to atrophy, they start to shrink. We know now that the initial strength gains that you get from resistance training don't come from bigger muscles, but rather they come from improved central nervous system communication. You actually get growth of the central nervous system, all the connections of the neurons and the things that tell the body to move. Moving with resistance training in particular, moving in different directions, doing different exercises, works on your brain's proprioceptive ability. This is knowing where your body is in space. What you don't train or what you don't exercise, you tend to lose that whole, that old adage, you know, what does it lose it or no, what is it? You don't use it, you lose it. There you go. Use it or use it or lose it, right? Totally true. And if you exercise properly, you don't lose it like somebody who doesn't. Well, we see examples of this when someone's been like in a cast, right? You ever had a cast on your arm or leg for a long period of time and then you break it off and the first time you try and wiggle or move the fingers? It feels very strange. It feels very strange and foreign. And that's just a small window of like, say, three months or six months that you were casted up, that all of a sudden it's like this, it's like learning to walk again or to move these fingers. That's a small window. Imagine over years and years and years of you stopping that communication to certain parts of the body or certain movements that the body should be able to do, you will start to lose that. Yeah. And, you know, studies will show that older populations that when they are bedridden for whatever reason, let's say they break a leg or a hip and they're in bed, you see mental decline really ramp up and accelerate. We forget that the brain is a part of the body, by the way. So, whatever makes the body healthy tends to make the brain healthy as well. It's all connected. I mean, we got to treat the body. It's a holistic perspective. The brain, the body inseparable. You need both and you need them both to be healthy. So they both need to be challenged to strengthen the entire body. Right. Another one is sleep. Exercise gives you deeper and better sleep. Part of the reason is because sleep is a recuperative recovery process. A lot of healing and recovery happens when you sleep. Well, exercise for all of its benefits, it is a stress on the body. In fact, that's why the body gets better and healthier is because it adapts to the stress. But when you provide the stress to your body, it also ramps up its ability to recover and recuperate. So you'll find that when you're active and you exercise, you go to bed, you sleep harder, deeper and more sound. Don't let you feel a lot of people just don't deplete themselves of these glycogen stores. They don't ever get to the point where you get exhausted. How much better you sleep as a result of that actually like expending that energy and not keeping all that pent-up energy inside. It provides a lot more restless sleep for me when I don't expend that energy. Well, Sal, you always like to talk about how we evolve. Like, do you think this is part of like how it sets your circadian rhythm even? Like, you get outside, you get sunlight, it tells the body naturally, oh, it's daytime. You do activity for hundreds of thousands of years. We were very active and physical throughout the whole day. Then the sun goes down and you're exhausted. You moved all day long. You were out in the sun. Now sun goes down. You've stopped all this movement so that then you sleep really well. I always notice when I get a good training session in, I get outdoors. That night I always sleep better than a day where I've been under fluorescent lights all day long and doing exercise. Yeah. Something that happens to the body when you go to sleep is your body temperature drops a little bit. This is part of the process. In fact, if it doesn't do this well, you typically have a tough time going to sleep. Well, increasing your body temperature during the day through exercise, study shows, improves your body's ability to reduce its body temperature at night. So it actually sets you up for better sleep in the evening. Some studies show a 65% improvement across the board. So 65% improvement across the board in sleep for people who just add a little bit of structured exercise. So if you have issues with sleep, one of the first things you could do is try doing a little bit of exercise during the day and then watch what happens. The next one, this one's a big one. Exercising reduces pain, especially nowadays. Most of the pain that we see nowadays in modern societies is the result of poor movement patterns, is the result of being inactive, of having muscle weakness, of having poor mobility. So exercise directly results in solving the root causes of a lot of problems that cause pain. In fact, if you have pain that's chronic and you go to the doctor and the doctor sends you to the physical therapist, the physical therapist doesn't have you lay down and go to sleep, they have you exercise. Well, it's one of the best things you could do for pain. This is also what makes the case of the difference between just being active and then actually exercising. Because you got to remember that if you consider yourself an active person, the body is still going to take the path with least resistance. So it's still going to figure out the easiest way for you to get by your day. So you can be an active person, but still not challenging range of motion, challenging muscles that need to be firing on a regular basis. So there's the difference between being active and then actually actively going to exercise the body and challenge it to where it adapts and builds muscle. Well, there's also somebody who has back pain because they have a weak core and tight hip flexors because of a weakness, right? That person is going to do different exercises than someone who has a back pain, has back pain because their back is weak, right? Both have back pain. Both do different forms of exercise. One of the wonderful things about exercise and one of the big differences between exercise and act and just being active is that exercise is targeted. So if I train myself, I can target my areas of pain and figure out why I have pain, train myself appropriately versus someone else who has maybe even similar pain, but coming from different areas. Just being active isn't going to solve the root cause nearly as well as having something structured, which exercise does. That's why again, physical therapy consists of targeted exercise. Right, it's specific. It addresses the weakness and that's what exercise provides, which then provides that stability and security your body needs to then maintain or regain abilities you used to have. Otherwise, it's a downward spiral. Once you lose an ability and you just go about doing activities, you're going to avoid the activities that aggravate the pain, which then just, I mean, compounds after that. Yeah. Now the next one's a funny one because I remember training clients as a trainer, as an early trainer, and I would start to get this comment, especially from my older clients. And it started to become real consistent. And I started to think, oh, this is after about three months of exercise, I can pretty much predict that I'm going to hear this from my older clients. And oftentimes they were embarrassed to bring it up or they would bring it up kind of in a sideways kind of way. Like they'd come up to me and say, you know, Sal, we've been working out now for a few months, a couple of days a week. And I'm noticing I have more energy. And then they look at me funny. And I say, Oh, like really revved up. Yeah. Oh, so you just feel more energized. Yeah. But I also noticed like a more like youthful feeling. I'm like, Oh, you can move better. Like, no, no, no, no, no, you're not getting this. Yeah. Your sex life has improved. And they'll be like, Yeah, yeah, I'm a little embarrassed. But yeah. And I would hear that kind of across the board that their sex life would improve. Exercise gives you better sex. And it does this through a few different ways. Number one, it makes you healthier. A healthy body is going to be more likely to desire, you know, having intercourse, because remember that, you know, having sex could result in having a child and a healthy body doesn't want to do that. If it, excuse me, an unhealthy body doesn't want to do that. And if a healthy kind of wants to do that improves your hormone profiles. There's also this mental psychological effect with just looking better. You know, when I'm you're improving yourself. Yeah. When I'm feeling strong and muscular and relatively lean, you know, I want to take my clothes off more, I feel better about myself, feel more confident. Exercise, structured exercise, consistently improves people's sex lives across the board. I feel like the confidence one is so big here when you're talking about sex too. Because I think just the things that you can do with exercise that's related to better posture and the way you carry yourself, that has a lot to do with just your everyday confidence and other aspects of life. But it really bleeds into this side. I think a lot of times when people have troubles either in their marriage or relationship or just with sex or intercourse in general, this is one of the areas that they just lack the confidence. One of the best things that you can do to sort of build that confidence is exercise, is addressing posture stuff. You start to carry yourself a lot more confidently. It just bleeds into the bedroom. It's more attractive and you could totally tell that by posture alone, which if you're not actively working on yourself and working on exercises specifically to keep you in that upright position, just looking at you is going to be less appealing to your partner. Yeah, I actually found a list of studies that are really interesting. There's one study that showed a group of women in their 40s observed that they experienced orgasms more frequently when they incorporated strenuous exercise like resistance training into their lifestyle. Another study, group of 178 healthy men reported that more exercise hours per week, those that exercise more per week had higher sexual function scores. Another one showed that a simple routine, that's just silly, but a simple routine of walking helped improve 41 men improve their erectile dysfunction symptoms by 71 percent. There's more, there's like an endless number of studies here that I could pull from, but exercise does a great job at improving your sex, not just through feeling better, but also the drive to have sex. If you feel like you have less motivation to have sex, exercise tends to improve that. And your sex drive oftentimes can be a good reflection of your health. When that drops, oftentimes there's a lot of things underlying the reason why it went down. So for all those reasons, again, there's way more than that. I mean, I could, we could literally make a list that's 100 long. Here's a top 10. These are the top 10 and these are the 10 that are proven beyond a shadow of a doubt by scientific study, by many, many studies to prove that exercise positively influences the 10 things that we just listened, listed. Now, Mind Pump is recorded on video as well as audio. So if you want to watch the podcast, come check us out on YouTube. You can also find all of us on Instagram. You can find Doug, the producer at Mind Pump Doug. You can find Justin at Mind Pump Justin. You can find me at Mind Pump Sal and Adam at Mind Pump Adam. Usually if you're sore for longer than a couple of days, like two days, I would say more than that, you're probably overdid it. If your soreness is impeding your performance in your next workout, you probably overdid it. If it's sore to the touch, rather than like, it's okay to get sore to where you have to stretch the muscle.