Better Exercise: Some Key Takeaways from 26 Years of Exercise Coaching

Better exercise is not what you think it is. Discussions around “better exercise” are oversimplified. They focus on exercise that is harder or more intense, or new trends and fads that supposedly work faster.

There are several problems with this discussion framing on better exercise.

First, how “hard” an exercise is is one of MANY parameters that determine how effective an exercise is. “Hard” is also a relative term. For (an oversimplified) example, running a marathon is very hard for most people. It is not hard for a seasoned marathon runner. However, a 10-second all-out sprint will be very hard for that same seasoned marathon runner. Both the marathon and the all-out sprint will be exceedingly difficult for someone who does not exercise. For that person, these activities are likely to cause injury.

Regarding exercise fads. “Fad” is the noun equivalent of the verb “fade”. Enough said.

I’m not writing this to criticize your exercise or tell you what to do. I probably don’t know you, and I am therefore in no position to author your exercise process. My goal in this post is to pass on my experience of 26 years as an Exercise Professional, exercise participant, exercise lover, and exercise facility owner. This is my perspective on what makes exercise better.

Framing “Better Exercise”

If you read the introduction above and thought something like “For who? Or for what?”, that’s great. I’m glad you’re thinking, and you’re in the right place!

Subjects like this need a certain amount of qualification and specific direction to land and make sense. When I talk about “better exercise” in this post, I mean the following things.

Better Exercise Produces Better Health (Or, it prevents your health from getting worse)

This is a great place to distinguish exercise from fitness. For any athlete to be at their peak fitness for their chosen sports, health must often take a back seat to effort.

I am not knocking these activities or their associated athletes. The athletes and coaches themselves will tell you the same thing. Exercise for better fitness does not necessarily equal better health and, therefore, does not necessarily equal better exercise.

In this framing, the exercise we want consistently produces better health.

Better Exercise is Sustainable

If you are exercising to add muscle to your frame, 45-60 minute workouts are likely better than 20-30 minute workouts. However, if you are busy with family, work, and the plethora of other responsibilities of today’s world, and longer workouts are not sustainable for you, you will not be successful with them.

Sustainability consideration also apply to:

• Your ability to understand how to perform the exercise you are doing.
• The effort levels of each workouts.
• Your exercise frequency.

Better Exercise is Enjoyable

Or at least it is not something you dislike extremely or intolerably.

If your exercise is painful, ineffective, overly complicated, intolerably boring, or otherwise disdainful to you, then it is bad exercise.

To be fair, maybe it is you who needs to change. Maybe you’re holding on to your “I don’t exercise because I’m not a gym person” whiny, resentful identity. I’ve been there, and it’s a hard thing to overcome. More power to you for pushing through it. However, you should also know that . . .

Any Exercise Professional worth the salt in their electrolyte drinks (haha) will meet you where you are, and accommodate and coach you appropriately. That includes designing your exercise in a way that avoids you resenting the entire process. If you are self-governing your exercise, you ought to do yourself this same basic courtesy.

Most Importantly, Better Exercise Produces Better Long-Term Health

Point blank: if your exercise is not making you healthier in the long term, then it is not good exercise. In my experience and view, exercise that produces health does not look like a specific type or types of exercise. However, all exercise forms that produce long-term health share certain features. The include:

• neither being too easy, nor too hard;
• producing positive physical responses absent of any significant physical or other impairments; and,
• either creating a body that is increasingly more robust and able to handle the demands of life, and/or slowing, stalling or reversing the effects of wear on the body from age, disease and other natural factors that would have a person’s body physically degrade in an expected, natural way.

Being in the Know About Your Exercise

A discerning reader of this post might ask, “How would I know whether the exercise I am doing falls under this framing of ‘better exercise’?”. It is a great question and one that deserves a thoughtful answer. I will do my best here.

Let’s imagine the answer in terms of timeframes. We will assume for this answer that you are a busy person with a demanding and sometimes unpredictable schedule. Maybe you have young kids, ailing parents, a demanding career, or all of those things and more. So, you make the wise decision to exercise first thing in the morning. Let’s also assume you have been exercising for a while and are reasonably fit and healthy. Or, you are at least well on your way to seeing yourself and truly being that way. While many factors can affect what I am going to describe here, hopefully this gives you a reference frame for whether or not you are on a good path.

Upon Waking in the Morning

You wake up at your regularly set time and are rather pleased at the prospect of exercising. Your body feels good. Yes, you are just waking up, but you do not have any significant soreness in your body. Or, perhaps you are going through a bout of dealing with some body pain. Even better! You have woken up noting the trend of having less pain in your body than in the days or weeks past. This is major progress! You are looking forward to your exercise so much that you’ve even laid your workout clothes in a neatly folded pile on your night table or on the floor beside your bed.

During Your Exercise

You have a plan for your exercise that you proceed with as you start your workout. It is not necessarily a rigid, detailed plan; it is an appropriate plan for your experience level and goals. It can be simple. Sometimes simple is best. Your body feels good throughout your workout. The exercise is challenging enough to warrant the rest periods between sets and exercises in your plan. The sense you get from the exercise is that something is being accomplished. The exercise is not necessarily pain-free, especially if you are someone exercising to resolve a chronic pain issue. However, the exercise does not make the pain worse. At most, it brings the pain into your conscious awareness, approaching it deliberately and progressively over time. If you do notice things slipping, you note it, and you contact the right professionals to advise you on how to correct your course.

You finish your exercise feeling uplifted and better than when you started. You have a sense of accomplishment and a feeling of agency, confidence, and momentary success in your body. This momentary success is part of a stack of similar successes from previous exercise sessions of this nature. The ability of your body is becoming increasingly interwoven with your sense of your “self”.

Through Your Day, Post-Exercise

You want to continue to succeed with your exercise, so you hydrate and eat well after your workout. You continue to do so through today, indulging mindfully on certain days as a part of an enjoyable, holistically healthy, and sustainable lifestyle. Your energy levels are stable throughout the day. You have the physical and mental bandwidth to put your best foot forward in your work, social and home settings. This does not mean that you are perfect or invulnerable to fatigue and life’s stresses. Rather, it means that you notice yourself progressively more able to participate in the various aspects of your life as evolving versions of your best self.

In the Evening and at Bed Time

As the evening settles in, you notice a different sense of feeling “tired” than you have in the past. Previously, it was as though you could not stay awake, and your body was giving up. Now that you have been exercising in a “better” way, that sense of “I can no longer continue” has transmuted. Somehow it’s more like “I feel great, and it is simply time to go to sleep”.

This, categorically, is the feeling of a body that has been rightly worn out by the efforts of the day, rather than one that has been rusted out and tarnished from those same stresses. You are grateful to be driven to sleep, and you sleep well (or, at least, better than you used to).

As Those Days Stack Up: Aging with Appreciation for Your Physical Vessel . . .

. . . you will find the effects of every individual day like the one I’ve described above in a positive feedback loop. You will feel better and better. And, you will have ever more agency and body confidence. As the effects of aging become increasingly relevant, you will find yourself disproportionately unaffected compared to your contemporaries. They will feel, function, look and live with a lesser quality compared to you. Your life will be physically easier than theirs. You will, in turn, have more bandwidth to enjoy leisure, family, travel and fun.

This is not to say that you are better than your less able-bodied contemporaries. In a sense, they do not matter. What matters is that you are better than you would have been had you let yourself rust out from a sedentary, effortless physical existence. Or, conversely, if you had worn out prematurely from exercise done badly: thoughtlessly, with inappropriate exertion (too high or too low), and with an improper balance in the tending to your needs in the moment and the long term.

Knowing Your Exercise is “Better”

Your experience in and with your body is your best guide to whether your exercise falls into the “better” category. Said another way, your lived experience of the physical and psychological effects of your exercise is the proof in your workout pudding.

Honesty Matters Most

There is one important caveat: it is essential to be honest about that experience. When I defined what “better exercise” entailed, I meant that all of the stated features were present. Most importantly, just enjoying something does not make it healthy. To use a couple of tropes, a man in his thirties might love heavy bench-pressing even if it causes searing shoulder pain. Many women might love their advanced Pilates reformer classes, even if they cause crippling back pain.

The keystone of honesty in your ongoing assessment of your exercise process is what keeps your exercise on track. The hard part is that you cannot know unless you make a conscious, mindful effort to determine whether your exercise is good at all. Even then, sometimes it is hard to tell.

At Striation 6, our goal is to take a health-first, client-defined approach to creating healthy, joyful, valuable exercise. We would love to meet you and see if we can help you with your process. We only accept clients whom we believe we can help. Therefore, all of our initial consultations are free of cost. If you would like to book a tour of our facility or a free consultation, click here and fill out our registration form. One of our team members will reach out to you to schedule your first visit.

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