Five Benefits of Physical Activity Beyond Strength, Fitness and Mobility

Make working out work for you

Last week’s article finished with a brief remark about why hating the process destroys adherence. We all know that adherence is essential to progress towards goals, so I think it’s important to discuss the benefits of physical activity and training beyond strength, fitness and mobility because these facilitate adherence when the others might not be moving, or if they simply aren’t motivating.

These factors can play an important role in facilitating adherence to a training program before and after the physical changes are noticeable. Many people who have been training for a long time focus less on advancing strength, fitness or mobility benefits of their training and instead focus on the benefits to physical and mental health, discipline and overcoming challenges.

So let’s break each of these down to explore the benefits of training and physical activity that go beyond strength, fitness and body composition.

Physical Health

Physical activity has benefits for all aspects of your health and wellbeing. It’s associated with reduced all-cause mortality (i.e. dying from anything) alongside improving many conditions including heart disease, cancer and musculoskeletal disorders.

The below chart is from a study I often discuss when talking to organisations about the importance of physical activity for their people. It shows the benefit of physical activity on healthy workers compared to those with one or more chronic diseases, and how many unplanned work hours they missed.

There is a clear difference between the healthy and chronic disease groups at the same physical activity, which seems pretty obvious. However, you might also notice the hours of unplanned absence in the healthy and low activity group are almost identical to the chronic illness and high activity group.

So while chronic illness contributes to unplanned absence in the workplace, physical activity plays an important moderating effect.

The application of the move it or lose it principle for physical activity builds upon this idea. Up until around 50 years old, most losses in strength, fitness and mobility can be regained with sufficient training. However, after this point we begin to see the age-related loss of muscle mass (sarcopenia) and loss of bone mineral density (which can lead to osteoporosis) start to accumulate.

Physical activity and resistance training are critical to maintaining muscle mass and bone mineral density. Whilst age-related declines cannot be prevented, maintaining physical activity and resistance training can ensure a higher starting threshold for both alongside slowing the decline.

Mental Health

“The best way to get out of your head is to get into your mind” — Tim Ferris.

The link between physical activity and mental health and wellbeing appears to be strong, even if the mechanism of how it influences specific conditions such as anxiety and depression is less clear.

Many people find that regular physical activity helps them to manage stress, anxiety and mindfulness. This might be in the form of early morning activity that helps keep you balanced for the day, or activity in the afternoon or even that is a stress release. Either way, it’s noticeable when physical activity drops off.

I personally find activity essential to managing my mental health and wellbeing. Completing the occasional challenging training session or just getting a session done when I didn’t feel like doing it provides a level of accomplishment in my routine.

I can also finish a session at 6:30 am in the morning, and even if I do nothing else productive for the rest of the day, I’m happy with my output (even if others might not be). In saying that, I’m at my most productive when physical activity and training are consistent.

Improving Discipline

The challenge of nutrition is that we eat so often and therefore must make many good decisions. 3–4 meals per day are 20–30 meals each week, each an opportunity to make a choice either aligned with our strategy or not.

Most people are training 3–6 times per week and at the start of a strategy, may be better off focusing on establishing the training routine as it can help their nutrition discipline later on.

Having that 3 pm snack and promising to ‘start again tomorrow’ is less tempting when you trained that morning and are on track for the week, or you have a training session that afternoon that you want to commit to.

Overcoming Challenges

It’s easy to get caught up in a lot of long term life goals such as getting a promotion, paying off the house and so on. But many of these are so far on the horizon that it feels like your daily activities have only a tiny impact on them.

The great thing about physical activity is you can challenge yourself over much shorter timeframes. When these objectives are aligned with your medium and long term training objectives, they can massively accelerate your progress.

You might want to increase your push-ups or reduce the time for your 5km walk over the next six weeks. If you train them twice per week, you’ve got 12 sessions to work towards your goal, which doesn’t give you much time to push any of them back.

Building Wealth

This was something I’d never considered — and probably don’t understand sufficiently to explain — but I had an interesting conversation a few years ago with a client who is an Actuary about the benefits of being healthy (not physical activity specifically) and its impact on wealth.

Their rationale was that being healthy led to a significantly reduced incidence of impairment or death before the age of 50. Impairment or death before this point had a significant impact on wealth accumulation, due to missing out on the golden years of employment from 50 to retirement where income typically reaches its highest point and expenses are reduced after the family phase, which creates a significant opportunity for saving and investing.

Additionally, being healthy pushed back the age at which many medical procedures were done. It didn’t necessarily reduce medical expenses, but these expenses were incurred later on. I should have asked, but I now wonder if total expenses were similar for the healthy group because they lived longer…

Anyway, not all of us think like Actuaries, which have its upsides and downsides, but the concept is interesting. Aside from the wealth component, it also makes sense that being healthy will help you make the most of your time later in life when work takes a back seat or ceases.

Summary

Thinking about the benefits of physical activity beyond strength, fitness and mobility can be handy in building adherence in the early stages, especially for those will less interest in the physical benefits.

Most people are sufficiently motivated by strength, fitness and mobility in the early stages, and these help them develop adherence to the program. The benefits discussed in this article simply become a byproduct of the process, without necessarily be the focus of the strategy.