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Micro wisdom delivered to your ears every morning in voice notes ranging from 3 to 15 minutes long. Wisdom on how to live a healthier and more fulfilling life. Every podcast will ground you in the present moment to ensure you know what's important, the here and now.
Hello. Good morning to you all. So today's topic is the benefits of exercise and mental health. Now you might be thinking, boring. You'd all of exercise if you're better.
Speaker 1:Yeah. Sound thing is, there's been a new massive meta review. It's crunched data from 97 meta analyses. Those meta analyses included data from more than 1,000 randomized clinical trials involving more than 128,000 people. It's the most comprehensive study on exercise and mental health to date.
Speaker 1:What did the study find? Now don't shoot the messenger. Do not be offended by this because everyone's got their own take on what helps with their mental health. This is what the results showed: exercise was as or more effective than counselling or medications that alleviated depression and anxiety. So some of the highlights.
Speaker 1:Moderate intensity and higher intensity exercise offered more mental health improvements than lower intensity movement. According to the researchers, higher intensities may be more effective at regulating brain levels of serotonin, a mood regulating brain chemical, and norepinephrine, which boosts alertness and attention than lower intensities. Workouts don't need to be long. People experience the most benefits when they exercise for roughly thirty minutes most days of the week. Though all types of physical activity were helpful, some types outperformed others.
Speaker 1:Resistance training seemed to offer bigger depression benefits, whilst yoga and other mind body exercises provide providing more help for people with anxiety. And what we mean by resistance training is any type of training that you're you're lifting weight or you're using some resistance bands or cables or even your own body weight, something that you're resisting against to push in. So it's important to note that a lot of people will go, well exercise is better than medication and therapy, so what's the part? Not better, but as equal to or better in some cases than medication or therapy, so don't bother doing medication or therapy. No.
Speaker 1:You need the holistic approach. If you're on medication, but you're not going to therapy, you're not exercising, best of luck to you. You're not gonna get anywhere. If you're on medication and going to therapy, then brilliant. You're using the medication to kind of get out the house or whatever, go to therapy, speak about things.
Speaker 1:If you're doing therapy and exercise, it's even better when you look at being able to talk and then having that outlet. But if you do require medication, and this is not for everyone, there was a weird push for antidepressants I would say, there was a big push to take them a few years ago where everyone was saying yeah, you've got the chemical imbalance in the brain and stuff and then a massive research study came out and said you know that it's not, that's not true and actually the medication themselves are just kind of making people feel a bit numb or whatever and didn't actually work that well unless the other things are either on top. So the medication allowed people to take actions that did help them. That's kind of the consensus it's going towards. So if you're listening to this and you're on medication, you're going to therapy and your exercise regime isn't there, give exercise a go.
Speaker 1:I think it's in New Zealand, also Canada, maybe both. The first line of treatment for anyone that's depressed or with anxiety is exercise there. They don't give anything else until they do the exercise first. So it's important that we look at this holistically, and it's 30 of something that's gonna get your blood pumping around, make you sweaty, challenge you. A thirty minute walk isn't really gonna do that.
Speaker 1:Even though some people can say that a thirty minute walk is exercise, it's not really enough. The height intensity is not there. You're not feeling afterward like wow I pushed myself there. And that feeling of pushing yourself for a workout is awesome, so you pushed yourself, you're gonna feel great, thirty minutes you're sweating, all the great endorphins are rushing about, just happy days. And again, I can't cover every specific case here.
Speaker 1:There are very severe, issues people need medication and way more advanced treatment for. They cannot be covered in a podcast by me, right? Some are claiming to be able to talk about that stuff, that's why we've got Ryan Williams involved and stuff like that. But we do underestimate nature, we do underestimate exercise, we do underestimate moving the body. I know a lot of people recommend the book The Body Keeps a Score, book on Trauma, when you read that, very clear that it's not just a mind down approach, it's a body up approach.
Speaker 1:The body must move, the body must feel, the body must feel good, the body must be in tune with nature, with the surroundings, right, so that it can sink in with the brain. The body can sometimes go into like a lizard mode or whatever he mentions where it's like shuts down doesn't move. It's kind of like both things have got to work in tandem. So this is great news, know. This is very good news in a sense like they've done a massive research study on this because when you think about what we need to do day to day to feel healthier, happier, and all this stuff, it's the basics: thirty minutes of exercise.
Speaker 1:If you want to do it daily, can do it daily, even do three or four times a week, brilliant. We know as well that it's only 90 to 150 minutes a week of exercise we need to do to get the health benefits. I'm not saying just the Galena, Benicallis, but like the general cardiovascular health and stuff like that. And we know we only need to do about six to 10,000 steps a day to get the health benefits of activity of walking as well. And we know as well we don't have to focus on all the micronutrients and the macronutrients, we have to focus on all of our stuff.
Speaker 1:You can just focus on calorie intake, which is your energy and your protein to start with. You don't need to go more advanced than this. You don't need to worry about if your salt is two grams or three grams. Some of you have got specific medications and conditions that may need to do that. Most people don't even worry about if their vitamin D is at 110% RDA, 90% RDA.
Speaker 1:Don't to worry about if you're taking magnesium and all that stuff, right? Most of us are worrying about all these small things, this and that. There's hundreds of metrics that people are looking at. When if you just ripped it all away and were to start and you could only pick five building blocks of health, like there's thousands of building blocks out there, we could pick five building blocks for health, it would be those basics, It would be your steps. It would be your calories.
Speaker 1:It would be your protein. It would be your resistance training. The fourth one for me, you're looking at a course of water intake and stuff like this, but I would say the fourth one for me would be something to do with mindfulness, whether it's journaling, whether it's sitting on your own, just observing, whether it's the yoga or meditating or the calm up, stuff like that. It's one of those types of mind releases or mind dumps. So you can really factor it on those five but why is it, and this is a question for you to ask yourself, why is it that we're always looking for more?
Speaker 1:Why aren't we covering the basics? You know, I'm doing the jujitsu classes now than six classes, and it's interesting when you think about how imagine I just decided I wanted to do the intermediate classes, which I need to do 60 classes on the beginners to even be able to do the intermediate classes, 60. Right? Then I've got to do a 120 classes at that to the end of one. So imagine I turn up and I'm on, you know, lesson nine, ten and building some confidence, and I start thinking, okay, I want to go to intermediate now, they go no, no, no, no, you've done the basics once or twice.
Speaker 1:You've got to do the basics over, over, over and you're always learning something new because you're a different person every time you step on the mat, every time you go back to our training. There's another day's past, time has passed. So when it comes to health and fitness, we're all trying to go to the lesson 60, we're going to lesson 90, we're trying to jump to brown belt and black belt, and you just can't do it in these martial arts. They laugh at you, you walk out, get out, you can't do it, They don't even allow you. But when it comes to health and fitness, there's so many people out there going, you want to train with me?
Speaker 1:Are you a beginner? Yeah. Okay, sound. Let me give you the toughest workout you'll ever do in your life, five times a week. Let me give you real low calories.
Speaker 1:You're going do cardio after the workout. Let me give you like a protein intake that's so high that you're gonna think what the hell are this fucking bodybuilders level, we're gonna increase your steps to 15,000 a day, and you're gonna really you're gonna have to meal prep everything, you're have to eat clean meat, clean, quote unquote, clean meals. You know, they jump straight into this kind of like crazy type of like level when most people don't need to go to the brown belt, black belt when it comes to nutrition. Right? Because the the real black belt of nutrition is the basics.
Speaker 1:And you will speak to the black belts in jujitsu and they say it's always the basics, know, even the black belts. Learn these fancy techniques, but do they use them all the time? Probably not. Do they kill a stomacher with the basics? Yes.
Speaker 1:So you might decide after a while you've done your protein intake, you've done your calories, you've done your steps, you've done your three workouts a week resistance training, you've done your journaling. Now you might start thinking, well, my energy levels aren't super great in the day, maybe it's something to do with the foods I'm eating or the timing of it and you go, yeah okay, if you've covered the basics and you're happy to add something else in without missing out on the basics, you then start thinking, okay well maybe my breakfast needs like more complex carbs and I need to eat added fats and protein as well. You try that out, experiment with it. Or you might say, well, I really wanna focus on building muscle in my legs. And you go, right, you're you're working legs once a week here, and it's, like, quite like it's not got much volume in it.
Speaker 1:So maybe we try, like, two leg workouts a week. We add more volume in, you know? And then you start looking at other stuff like your fat intake, your fat intake doesn't want to be too low but you're like well my fat intake is quite low, maybe if I increase my fat intake and increase my calories a bit, see what happens. Know there's a lot of things you do as your journey goes on but you still don't have to do them, you just live a completely healthy happy life without looking at all of these metrics. But you can learn them if you want to, but you've got to go through the basics.
Speaker 1:So this is a real good study for you to take in today. It makes me feel better about trying to live healthier anyway, cuts all the shit away. So today, go and do some exercise, go and do something for your mental health and think about the analogy of trying to skip class and go into lesson sixty, seventy, 80 when you're only on lesson eight or nine. Go back to the basics today, do them over and over. If you think it's boring, it's just how it is.
Speaker 1:Nothing it doesn't have to be exciting. You don't have to always be changing things up for things to work. That's another flaw we have. We're all looking for shiny objects. Shiny object syndrome is called.
Speaker 1:You you need to forget about those things, it's the basics. Everyone will tell you this is successful. Writers, athletes, people are good at their job, people that are good at anything will tell you they've just done the basics over and over and over. So when it comes to your health, why do you think that's any different? Ponder that, and I'll be back tomorrow with another podcast.
Speaker 1:So enjoy. Speak to you soon.