One of the ways we can honor God with our bodies is by exercising and staying in shape. This leads to physical prosperity, which means you are adding life to your years and years to your life.
1 Timothy 4:8 (NKJV)
For bodily exercise profits a little, but godliness is profitable for all things, having promise of the life that now is and of that which is to come.
Notice it does not say exercise doesn’t profit at all. It is the neglect of spiritual training that the apostle Paul is warning against here, not the unimportance of regular exercise. The question becomes: Are you in shape spiritually and physically?
Now before you ask, “What’s a preacher know about exercise?” Remember, I did spend 10 years in the health club industry so I know a little about this thing called exercise; this thing 7 out of every 10 Americans view as drudgery. They may not verbalize it as such, but they say it nonverbally by remaining overweight and out of shape. After spending 10 years in the health club industry, I discovered the #1 reason people give for wanting to start an exercise program and the #1 excuse people give for not exercising.
The #1 reason people give for wanting to start an exercise program is they want to lose weight and tone up. Eighty percent of the people that came into my health club said they wanted to lose weight and tone up. This also happens to be the #1 New Year’s resolution in America.
The #1 reason people give for not exercising is: “I don’t have the time.” However, the paradox of time is that everybody has all there is, but nobody ever seems to have enough. The obvious conclusion is that we can’t use that excuse anymore, can we?
One of the reasons people say they don’t have the time to exercise is because they think that in order to enjoy the benefits they have to exercise 5 and 6 days a week for hours on end. The reality is that to achieve a good level of fitness, the level the experts say will extend our lives and enhance the quality of our lives, we only have to exercise 3 times a week for about an hour.
Here are the facts: 98% of Americans understand the benefits of regular exercise, but only 23% of them exercise regularly. That means 75% of Americans know exercise is good for them but they don’t do it.
One of the reasons people do not exercise regularly is because they think they have to exercise for hours on end seven days a week. The old “no pain, no gain” mindset still reverberates in our minds. We still feel that in order to get the results we want, we have to exercise for hours on end, seven days a week…and suffer while we do it! The reality is that to achieve a good level of fitness, the level that the experts say will add life to our years and years to our lives, we only have to exercise 3 times a week for about an hour each time. There are 168 hours in a week; your body only asks for 3!
Now let’s take a look at what makes up each hour of exercise. Each hour is divided into two 30 minute segments.
The first 30 minutes of your exercise hour is devoted to aerobic exercise. Aerobic exercise strengthens your heart. Aerobic exercise is any activity that uses the large muscles in your body, primarily your legs, in a continuous rhythmic motion. Some examples include walking, biking, swimming, stair climbing, jogging, and rollerblading.
Aerobic exercise will also help you burn fat, which is important for long term weight management. The key to effective weight management is to burn more calories than you consume. Simply stated, if you eat more calories than you burn off, you will store the excess as fat and gain weight. Thirty minutes of aerobic exercise at a moderate level will burn about 300 calories.
The second 30 minutes of your exercise hour is devoted to strength training, or what we call resistance exercise. When it comes to lifting weights, we are not so much interested in building big muscles as we are in adding lean muscle. Long, lean muscle can be added by lifting a moderate amount of weight 12 –15 times.
Here are 3 great benefits you will enjoy from a strength training program:
- For every pound of lean muscle you add, you will burn up to 100 calories a day even when you are not exercising. This is the key to long term weight management – change your metabolism so you are burning calories even when you are not exercising.
- Resistance exercise adds bone density which helps prevent osteoporosis, a disorder in which your bones become more porous and brittle, and more apt to fracture.
- When you strengthen the muscles that are adjacent to your joints, you take the burden off the tendons and ligaments in your joints. This helps prevent osteoarthritis, which is the breakdown and eventual swelling of your joints.
It is never too late to pick up a dumbbell. Strength-training studies on older sedentary adults have consistently found significant muscle gain in as little as two months. In one such study, a group of beginning weight trainers, ranging in age from 75-90, averaged a 10% increase in lean muscle mass and boosted their overall strength by more than 100% in just 10 weeks!
In addition to the physical benefits of regular exercise, your mental fitness and your emotional health are two additional reasons to start and maintain a regular exercise program. The reason this is true is because exercising makes you feel great!
I talk more about how easy it is to enjoy the benefits of regular exercise in my message: Physical Prosperity: How to Add Life to Your Years and Years to Your Life. This single CD is available here.