THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WORKING OUT AND BEING SEDIMENTARY!
We have a serious problem today when it comes to not moving enough, the average person sits on a chair for 13 hours out of 16 hours of being awake.
They move their bodies for only 3 hours per day, there is a chance they might be moving more frequently when they are asleep.
One of the solution proposed to this problem is exercise, we can compare exercise with a nutritional supplement, in the sense that it is a concentrated and isolated source of something that you should be getting in the context with other things in different quantities and frequencies.
Sitting on a chair for most of the day, followed up by some exercise at the end of the day would be the equivalent of eating junk food breakfast lunch and dinner, than swallow a multivitamin pill and believe that you have a healthy diet, because you are not missing any nutrition because of the pill.
Not only that the exercise won't cancel all the negative effects of the sedimentary lifestyle, but there is some evidence that it might be actually bad for you, you are certainly going to increase your chance of injury.
Most people try to fix their sedimentary lifestyle by becoming sedimentary athletes, at the end of the day it doesn't matter what you can do at the gym or that you can run a marathon, if you sit for 13 hours per day you are still sedimentary.
The human body wasn't design to be immobile for long periods of time, or move at a high intensity to frequently. Both patterns of movement will cause injury.
Most people who are sedimentary and work out will end up with two sets of injury one for being sedimentary and another from working out.
As far as I can tell we evolved to move at a slow intensity frequently through the entire duration of the day, maybe with some occasional infrequent burst's of explosives movement.
Think of it like this, if you play with a paper clip by bending it back and forth, over and over again, it will eventually get hot and break. However if you give it a few bends put it on the table for a few minutes than pick it up again and give it a few more bends, it is going to take a lot longer until the material is
going to fail and break.
This is exactly what is happening to your body when you exercise, do to the repetitive movement during exercise will increase your chances to damage your body.
Also there is a myth about how people have moved historical, this idea that we used to do hard labour all day, like plow fields, chop wood and carry heavy objects.
But this increase in physical demand of your body is pretty recent, before agriculture you could argue that human life was relatively free of hard physical labor. Harvesting wild food, living in a tropical worm environment that doesn't require wood for heat or complex shelter. The amount of physical work was relatively small. So there is no larger physical movement deficiency you have to make up for through exercise.
I am not completely against exercise the same I am not completely against supplements, but I think that you should take the majority or as much as possible of your nutrition and movement from natural complex sources, and than because you live in an imperfect environment add a small amount of exercise to make up for that.
Exercise can be great at helping you to rehabilitate your body, recover from injury, but it is my opinion that doing large amount of it frequently or in large amounts will do more damage than good.