Did Your Excuse For Not Exercising Just Get Validated?

Exercise helps, and it's an old news. But an exercise that puts you through intense regime or the one that you aren't too keen to do, might just have an opposite impact.

Dr. Andrew Huberman, Neuroscience Professor at Stanford and a podcaster, spoke about what people misunderstood about stress. Dr Huberman said, " There's is an experiment in animals, where a rat is given an opportunity to run on the treadmill. Rats and rodents of all kinds love running on the treadmill. There is something rewarding about it for them. But, in any event it lowers their blood pressure, it leads to improvements in a number of health metrics that you expect. And, you see the same thing in humans who run on treadmill or outdoors, swimming or cardiovascular exercises."

He adds, " And I love to talk about an experiment where they took two different cages with animals. one is running voluntarily but then that running wheel is tethered to a running wheel in the other cage."

The other cage encloses an animal and forces it to run, every time the other one runs. "So, it's forced exercise, versus voluntary exercise. The takeaway is very straightforward. Voluntary exercise leads to improvements in all sorts of health metrics— resting heart rate, blood pressure, blood glucose, resting blood glucose. The animal that is forced to exercise, you see opposite.

So it's not exercise per say. It's something about being forced to exercise that causes decrements in a number of health metrics. And it's the same for humans to."

So, the takeaway from this discussion is that, if you want to engage in physical exercises, pursue something that you would voluntarily do, without getting stressed about. It will be more beneficial.