Physical activity:

Physical activity is one of the core elements to physical health. This means the use of your body in some form of physical exercise. This can mean all manner of activities depending on your body, age, interests and circumstances: playing with children, going for long walks, doing jiu-jitsu, running a marathon, doing yoga, waiting tables, playing soccer and gardening or some varied examples of physical activity.

◇ What Works for You: It is important to allow yourself to find the kind of physical activity which makes you feel happy: we do not all need to spend an hour at the gym everyday. Physical activity should be a practice that refreshes you, not one that creates tension, stress or negative thought patterns.

◇ Fitness Culture: Be aware that our culture has, as with many things, a certain culture around fitness and exercise which is not necessarily healthy.

What this means is that many people come to believe that the only acceptable form of exercise is an exhausting workout regime, whose evidence is a certain physical appearance.

In fact this idea of exercise and fitness is rather extreme and the body-image it produces is less natural than we think it is: men and boys are not necessarily meant to have enormous arms and shoulders, women are not necessarily meant to have tiny waists.

Exercise is about developing a sense of vitality and feeling refreshed. It can be an adventure to investigate the many ways of using your body in order to find practices which work for you.

Fitness and a Healthy Perspective: Avoid rigidity and perfectionism, exercise is about finding a way to build vitality and feel refreshed, as much mentally and emotionally as physically, and not about seeking exhaustion or achieving physical standards of beauty, or about being virtuous. If you miss a day, that’s okay, if you prefer gentler movement, that’s okay too. Find what suits you.

◇ The way to develop an exercise routine and begin working on your fitness is to build the habit of exercise into your daily and weekly life first, and once that habit is established, begin increasing the intensity or the content of your exercise activity to reach fitness goals.

◇ Linking exercise with things that you enjoy, such as spending time with friends and family, going outside, or listening to music.

◇ Setting realistic goals, such as beginning by exercising three times a week, for thirty minutes a day, or by saying that you want to run a 5k in three months.

Exercise and Mood: exercise is an excellent, free and pretty quick way to improve your mood and alleviate anxiety. Physical activity and the hormones and energy this releases helps to diffuse tensions and the accumulation of depression and anxiety in the brain. Going for a run when you're feeling down can give you a boost for hours afterwards, and doing so regularly can be more effective than medication.

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