The best definition I have heard for fitness was from Swedish exercise physiologist, Heming Atterbom, Ph.D., quoting some one else when he said, "Fitness is distance from death." The more fit you are, the further you are from death. Therefore, fitness is health and I am going to teach you key basics concerning fitness and health.
Remember that I am a biologist, I have studied all of the sports sciences, and I have spent decades dealing with athletes, especially marathon athletes. I am going to teach you the truth about diet and exercise. This is going to be a really huge myth buster. You can bet that almost everything you currently believe about exercise and diet is wrong, with much of it having been proven wrong half a century ago because most people get almost everything they know about exercise and diet from TV, magazines, and newspapers.
I have found it amazing how much of this is not known by most doctors because they don't study exercise physiology. I have been watching as doctors are finally beginning to learn some of this because of them finally doing the same research exercise physiologists did more than half a century ago. The sick thing is that they could learn all of this and much more by simply taking a few exercise physiology courses. Because they don't, most of what medical doctors believe about diet and exercise is wrong. So don't feel so bad because you don't know it.
I have been watching fad diets, exercise programs, and such be wrong 100% of the time for decades, almost half a century, very often resulting in the injury and even death of people. I realized decades ago that, if you were to put better than 90% of what has been said and written about diet and exercise in the trash, the world would be much better off. It is time to write this essay for your benefit and, if you stick to the basics I am going to teach you and forget about the fads you keep seeing on TV and in the magazines and newspapers, you will be much better off.
Always remember that TV, magazines, and newspapers are in the business of selling advertising and will say anything they have to in order to increase viewer ship/readership to increase advertising revenues. Remember that "the love of money is the root of all evil". Deal with it and don't ever forget it because it is a fact and is the primary reason why you can't believe more than a maximum of 10% of what you see on TV or out of Hollywood or read in magazines or newspapers. At best they just don't know what they are talking about but it is often fraud or criminal. The most criminally fraudulent industry in the US is the media including Hollywood.
It is also important to state at this time that I have seen a huge increase in the number of "scientific research projects" which are really nothing more than some Ph.D. selling his college degree to some business or industry and doing a phony research project to "prove" whatever that business or industry wants them to prove about their product or service. This is the main reason why you see so many conflicting results for scientific research. It is criminal fraud at its best. If "scientific research proves" something like coffee, wine, or a certain health food supplement prevents or cures something like cancer or autism, you can bet that it is fraudulent research done by a whore with a college degree. Any more, college degrees are bought and sold like any other commodity. College graduates have no more integrity than a high school drop out and many are actually being taught how to play the whore by selling their degrees. It is a really huge criminal racket that actually kills people.
Exercise
In the scriptures, God wrote that we should work or exercise six days a week and rest one day per week. This was when almost all jobs were very hard physical work and provided considerable exercise. In decades of working with athletes I have learned that the best exercise program is to exercise six days a week with one day for rest. Gee, what a coincidence. I guess God knew what he was talking about.
If you study anthropology, you will learn that the reason God gave us this law was because people were being worked from at least sun rise to sun set seven days per week and it was literally killing them. God gave us the Sabbath to save us from being worked to death. He knows how the human body functions because He created it.
Today, because of technology, we have gone to the other extreme where people are working five days per week for a living but not getting any exercise and it is killing us by the millions. It turns out that, physically, we need to exercise or do physical work six days a week to remain healthy. If we don't, we get fat and die. Technology has made our lives so much easier that we don't get the physical exercise we need to remain healthy and many people have learned to exercise after work to get the exercise our bodies require to remain healthy. The rest of you are just being killed off by technology.
But, if you have not been exercising and want to start up, you don't just go out and hammer yourself to death. The amount of work or exercise you should be doing is based on your fitness level caused by the amount of physical work you have been doing. No two people should be doing the exact same workout unless they have the exact same fitness level. So, how does one get started in an exercise program?
Startup
You have two basic types of exercises, aerobic and anaerobic and too many health clubs are falsely selling anaerobic programs as being aerobic to increase their business. The truth is that you must sustain exercise for an absolute minimum of 20 minutes before aerobic exercise begins in full. The longer the exercise is sustained (no stops for rest) over 20 minutes, the more aerobic the exercise will be.
Yes, the "aerobic" weight lifting program will increase your aerobic fitness level but only very slightly because weight lifting is an anaerobic form of exercise because it is not continuous exercise for more than 20 minutes. Any one who tells you that you can get the same or better workout in less than 20 minutes by doing it their way or using their exercise thing, either doesn't know what they are talking about or is committing fraud. Easily, better than 98% of what I have heard and seen concerning exercise has been completely wrong because the human body simply doesn't work that way, I don't care what you do to it or which machine you use.
The top aerobic exercises include such things as walking, hiking, bicycling, running, swimming, skating, cross country skiing, rowing, and anything else which requires moving your body mass over a distance using your muscles and you must sustain that exercise for a minimum of 20 minutes for the best aerobic fitness development to begin. Obviously, marathon sports are the best aerobic exercises.
The other types of exercises are best for developing a variety of strength, speed, agility, coordination or motor skills, hand-eye coordination, recovery, and such forms of fitness. These forms of fitness development are also good but aerobics fitness is most important so, to keep this essay from becoming a book, I will focus on aerobic fitness.
One thing you have to learn that a lot of exercise physiologists are not taught in college and have to learn in the real world is that different types of fitness development are not points but are part of a line. The further you move to one end of the line, the less you will develop of one thing while developing more of another thing such as endurance and speed. For example, the longer the workout or more aerobic the workout, the more endurance and less speed you will develop but, the shorter and more intense the workout, the less endurance and more speed you will develop.
Therefore, you have to learn to properly balance your program depending on your current fitness level in relation to your goals. If your goal is to increase endurance, then you increase the length of your workouts but do so very gradually. Always remember that Rome wasn't built in a day and your body is much more complex than Rome ever was or will be.
It is also important to know that endurance is built based on miles or hours per workout or day and not miles or hours per week. You will develop much more endurance riding a bicycle 300 miles per week, if done right, than riding the bicycle 600 miles per week, if done wrong. For example, if you ride 600 miles per week only riding 85 miles per day, you won't develop as much endurance as you will in riding one 100 mile ride each week with less distance on the other five days of a good workout. A 300 mile per week workout doing daily distances of 100 miles, 20 miles, 60 miles, 20 miles, 80 miles, off, and 20 miles will develop much more endurance and also provide better quality workout for increased speed, power, recovery, acceleration, and such by working harder on the 60 and 80 mile days with easy rides for recovery on the 20 mile days than you will get by riding 85 miles per day, seven days per week for 600 miles. The latter will also cause you to overtrain and stop improving.
Endurance or aerobic fitness is not cumulative for the number of miles or hours ridden per week but is based on the number of miles you did in ONE workout only. The human body simply doesn't function the way most athletes, personal trainers, and coaches think it functions. The most important thing to remember for aerobic or endurance fitness is that aerobic or endurance fitness is based entirely on the duration of the individual sustained exercise and has absolutely nothing to do with how many miles or hours you worked out per week. The idea that miles or hours per week count for endurance fitness development is one of the biggest myths in exercise and sports in spite of the fact that it was scientifically proved false in the 1960s by Kenneth Cooper, Ph.D. with his extremely extensive research in aerobics fitness development. Fact!!!
To meet the needs of beginning athletes (everyone who workouts is an athlete to at least some extent), I developed a start up method to prevent the most common mistakes in starting up a training or exercise program because I realized that no one else had done it. Absolutely everyone starts out by doing too much, spend the last of their workout in misery and don't want to workout again because it is only normal human behavior to remember the misery at the end of the workout and not the fun at the beginning of the workout. The most common way people tend to do this is take out traveling away from home until they start to feel tired then turn around to begin the return home. This is a huge mistake because they will tire even more returning home and end up struggling most of the way home in absolute misery. It will be a death march. To them, that workout won't be any fun and they won't want to workout again. That is normal human behavior.
I have found that the people who stick with their workout are the people who return home fresh enough that the workout was fun all of the way and didn't include a death march at the end of the workout. Therefore, the best way to approach a workout is to make sure it will be fun all the way to the end leaving you wanting to workout more and not hate working out. It is best to always be wanting to workout more so that you will want to continue your program.
The concept of no pain, no gain was dreamed up by a gym jock to impress people and was caught onto by the media. This concept has been passed around so long that it is now believed as fact but is wrong. For most people, especially non competitive athletes, if you hurt during your workout but especially after your workout, you did it wrong. The simple truth is that most people should enjoy the entire workout without any pain, especially non competitive athletes. Your workout should always be fun.
My system is simple and works very well. You set up a short course from which you can easily retire at any point on the course without struggling to get home. For example, let's say you want to start by running or cycling. You clock a course using your car or motorcycle around the block you live on and we will say, for simplicity, that it is a half mile course. Then you run or bicycle around that course until you BEGIN to feel tired but are still enjoying the workout and quit. Then you take half that distance and that will be the first leg distance for an out-and-back run or ride. Let's say you did one mile on your test run. You run out from your house for half a mile and return home. When you get home, you will still feel like you want to do more and will be more likely to exercise the next day because your last workout was fun all the way to the finish. There was no death march dragging your tired butt home.
Now you need to do this workout three days per week without any increases in distance for three weeks to permit your body to properly condition to the new workload. This will increase the ease and fun with which you workout, increase the tendency to continue your workout, and decrease the potential for exercise related injury. After the three weeks, you start increasing your workout by increasing the workout to five or six days per week for at least two weeks for additional conditioning. Now you are doing that mile run six days a week. Then you start increasing your weekly mileage by no more than 5% to a maximum of 10% of your weekly total every two weeks until you achieve your fitness level goal.
Everyone should EVENTUALLY workout at least one hour of continuous exercise per day for six days per week. So this should tell you it will take some time to achieve your fitness level goal. Take your time and don't get hurt or burned out. It is much better to continue to enjoy your workout so you will want to continue working out than to try to rush your fitness development and get hurt or burn out resulting in you not wanting to workout.
If you want to continue developing beyond working out one hour per day six days per week, it will be best to restructure your week to continue beyond that workout level. The way to best do this is to increase the distances or time for only three days per week while keeping the other three workouts at one hour of easy effort per workout. For example, if you want Sunday to be your longest day with Tuesday and Thursday being your other two longer days, then you start by gradually increasing the Sunday workout by the 5% to 10% of your weekly workout one week and then increasing the duration of your Tuesday and Thursday workouts each by half of the 5% to 10% of your weekly workout the next week. This permits your body two weeks to condition to the increase in each of your workouts before you increase the duration of that workout again and helps prevent overtraining, burnout or training related injuries.
Diet
There is a huge myth in common diet knowledge which states that it is not possible to burn enough calories with exercise to burn up eating a lot of fun food and, therefore, the only way to control weight is by dieting. This myth is based on charts for calories burned up during a given exercise and those charts are for people who are not very fit.
For example, in these charts, they show that riding a bicycle at 13 mph on flat ground for one hour will only burn about 350 calories. A person who can only ride a bicycle at 13 mph on flat ground is in really terrible shape. What those charts don't show is that a 5' 10" person weighing about 140 pounds riding a bicycle on flat ground with no wind blowing at 75 degrees F at a steady 24 mph will burn 1,256 calories per hour or more than 5,000 calories in a 100 mile bike ride under those ideal conditions or more calories than in a two layer chocolate cake with the icing which is only 4,850 calories. They also don't tell you that a bike racer traveling at 35 miles per hour on flat ground will burn at least twice as many calories per hour than at 24 mph because of the nature of wind resistance. You get anywhere from a strong recreational cyclists to a racer hammering hard in the mountains for 100 miles and they can easily burn more than 8,000 to 10,000 calories in just one ride. That is almost two chocolate layer cakes with the icing. Oops, I guess common dieting knowledge is wrong.
The fun thing about being a marathon athlete is that you get to eat anything you want and I am going to prove that to you. :-) Marathon bicyclists and swimmers and cross country skiers burn more calories per hour than any other athletes. If you like eating all kinds of great "fattening" food, those are the best sports to get into. More than a decade ago a scientist figured out that the average racer in the Tour de France burned an average of 32 jelly donuts per day for 21 days or burned enough calories in three weeks to equal 672 jelly donuts. When I was just in good marathon shape, not racing shape, I used to laugh at the diet people who wished they could eat this, that, or something else because I HAD to eat those things just to keep from getting sick and, as a marathon athlete, 8% of your calorie intake has to be fat. Think fried chicken, cheese cake, hamburgers, French fries, pizza,....
You need to know that the average person burns an average of 1,500 to 2,000 calories per day or 10,500 to 14,000 calories per week just for life functions. You add to this what the average person burns from exercising and you get your required calorie intake just to stay healthy and alive. For example, if I burn 14,000 life function calories per week (active people will) and ride a bike 300 miles per week only averaging 6,000 calories per 100 miles (flat rides, no mountains) or 18,000 exercise calories per week, I will burn 32,000 calories per week and you can't ingest that many calories with regular "healthy" food unless you want to chain your butt to the toilet because of all the fiber. There are only 100 calories in a 10 inch banana and 60 calories in the average apple so that, to try and replace that many calories with fruit and vegies would give you a serious case of the trots. When you are burning that many calories per week, you MUST eat the fatty fun stuff just to be able to keep riding. :-) It is amazing how many intellectuals think marathon athletes are so skinny while eating so much food is purely because of their cell metabolism and genetics and not because of the calories they burn. Well, so much for that diet myth.
Why dieting doesn't work
I have been reading about increasing numbers of medical doctors saying that dieting doesn't work. Not one diet has every worked. If you study Endocrinology, you know why. There are these cells in the duodenum (doo-wahd-num) or first foot of the small intestines attached to the stomach which have little receptor molecules embedded in their cell membranes. these little cells sit there quietly "turned off" waiting for a piece of partially digested food from the stomach to hit that receptor molecule which acts like a switch and "turns the cell on" when a piece of food makes contact with the receptor molecule. When the cell gets "turned on" it produces and pumps a small amount of hormone into the blood. When those hormones reach the adrenal gland, the hormones turn on cells in the adrenal gland which pump out adrenaline which is carried to the body cells by the blood. The adrenaline increases the metabolic rate in the body cells burning up more calories for a brief period of time.
If you eat less, there will be fewer food molecules turning on the cells in the duodenum which means that those cells won't produce the hormone which eventually increase cell metabolic rate which is known as suppressing the cell metabolic rate. In other words, eating less or no food (dieting) causes you to burn fewer calories so, biologically, dieting can't work.
This is a survival mechanism God programmed into the human body so we could survive long enough as hunter/gathers to become agrarian so we would have a much more consistent food supply. You see, as hunter/gathers, our ancestors would have to go anywhere from a few days to weeks with little or no food until they could make a kill, especially during the winter when there was little to no vegetation to gather and eat. Suppressing our body's metabolic rate made it possible for us to live longer until we made the next kill and could eat right again. The best way to design such a control system is have that system using the control or feedback based on food consumption. This survival system built into the human body is further proof for creation because we could not have survived long enough to become agrarian without it.
The great demon, Sugar
There is a huge myth that regular table sugar or sucrose is bad for you. If you listen to the scientifically ignorant liberals, it is poison, highly toxic and will kill you. (If you are a liberal, at this point, you panic, start screaming, and running around in circles because I mentioned sugar.)
If you studied biochemistry, you should know that sucrose is two molecules of glucose bonded together with a carbon bond and nothing else. That is all sucrose is. You should also know that sucrose is too large of a molecule to permeate or get through the tissues separating your digestive tract from your blood so sucrose can't get into your blood. You should also know that, as soon as the sucrose hits the amylase digestive acid in your mouth of hydrochloric digestive acid in your stomach, these digestive acids break that carbon bond turning the sucrose molecule into two molecules of glucose which will permeate the tissues separating your digestive tract from your blood and permit the two molecules of glucose get into your blood. Fact!!!
As soon as the glucose gets into your blood, it is taken to your liver where it is turned into glycogen which is cell food. The glycogen is either stored in your liver for future use by your cells or is taken to your cells by your blood to either be used for fuel at that time or stored for future use. Therefore, sucrose could not possibly be bad for you, it is cell food. Therefore, New York's Mayor Bloomberge is a big ignorant liberal dummy who is insanely obsessed with "saving" everyone from a....myth? Myth busted!!!
What is fiber?
Basically, fiber is the stuff in your food that your body doesn't digest, is passed through your digestive tract to your rectum, and builds up in your rectum creating pressure against the rectum walls stimulating peristaltic waves down the sides of your rectum pushing the fiber out of your rectum or causing you to take a crap. In a nut shell, that is fiber and what it does in your system, it simply causes you to take a crap and cannot cause you to lose weight. The only thing increasing fiber in your diet can do is increase regularity, if you are having trouble taking a crap on a regular basis. If you are not constipated, you don't need more fiber and too much fiber can give you the runs or trots along with dehydrating your body. Myth busted!!!
What is fat?
I will bet that almost none of your journalists can answer that question intelligently. The answer is cell food. :-) That is right, fat is cell food, along with a few other things. For example, your cell walls are made up almost entirely of two layers of fat and without enough fat in your diet, your cell walls break down and your cells die causing you to die. If you don't get enough fat into your body, you die. Your fat intake needs to be about 8% of your total calorie intake.
When fat gets into your digestive system, it is processed by vitamin D into fatty acid so it can permeate into your blood stream. You get the vitamin D when the "deadly" sun light hits your skin cells causing them to generate vitamin D. (Yes, you need sun light to be healthy and survive because, without vitamin D, you can't process fat into fatty acid so it can get into your body and be used by your body.) When fat is stored in your body, the fat cells turn the fatty acid in your blood stream back into fat for storage and will turn the fat back into fatty acid before it is returned to your blood.
The only time your body stores fat other than the non digestible fats used to cushion the palms of your hands, souls of your feet, your buttocks, and women's breasts, is when you are not exercising enough to burn as much fat as you are ingesting. If you exercise enough to burn all of the fat you consume, your body won't have anything to store. Fact!!!
Please note that cholesterol (both the "good" and "bad" types) is a type of fat and, therefore, is also cell food. If you exercise enough to burn up all of the cholesterol you consume, there won't be any "bad" cholesterol to build up in your arteries. You don't see marathon athletes with a build up of cholesterol in their arteries and they have to eat a lot of high cholesterol foods. Fact!!!!
The fat and cholesterol myths busted, big time!!!
Calcium
For years there has been a fad scaring people into consuming large quantities of calcium. If you study the science of Endocrinology, you will learn that there is a small range of calcium level for your blood which is healthy. If you get too little or too much calcium in your blood, you will get sick and even die. If you eat a normal healthy diet like they taught in the 1950s and 1960s, you get enough calcium, especially if you drink whole milk and not that watered down cow pee they call milk. You have to be very careful about taking in excessive amounts of calcium from abnormal sources like antacids and pills, it can kill you.
Water
For decades I have been watching people screaming that we should all take in more and more water while regularly reading about people who died because they took in too much water. That is right, too much water can kill you just like too much of anything can kill you. Too much or too little oxygen causes brain damage while just the right amount is required for a healthy brain.
What happens with water is that, when you get too much in your digestive tract, it forces too much water to diffuse into your blood which creates hypervolemia or excessive blood water level (actually means increased blood volume and excessive water will cause the condition). The excessive blood water level force diffuses water into your cells causing the cell walls to become distended or inflamed called cell inflamation. When cell walls are inflamed, the cell walls can't apply the inward pressure required to keep the molecules inside the cells in close enough proximity to each other for proper molecular activity. This will cause cell structure and function break down which will cause cell death and, if enough of the right cells die, you die. Basically, your cells drown internally killing you.
Also, hypervolemia can cause too much pressure against the heart resulting in heart failure, especially if you already have heart problems. Over the last few decades, there have been a number of athletes who cheated by taking EPO to increase the red blood cells in their blood (one cause of hypervolemia) and died because the increased viscosity or thickness of their blood caused heart failure. So hypervolemia can kill even athletes with strong hearts.
So, how much water should you take in?
I am going to teach you a little exercise physiology trick to help with this but first I need to deal with protein because there are too many people taking in too much protein in pills and powders and that exercise also works for protein.
There is a very common myth about taking in more protein will cause you to build more strength and muscle mass. This myth is most common in the gym with weight lifters. The truth is that your body can only use so much protein even following the most arduous exercises, you know, like marathon sports. Your body stores very little extra protein outside of cell structure and gets rid of the rest of it through your kidneys.
A person on a normal, healthy diet from the 1960s got two to three times more protein than their body needed but no problem because your body can easily handle getting rid of that much extra protein. The excess protein is broken down into urea and a few other harmless molecules and filtered out through the kidneys into the bladder where the urea breaks down into uric acid (causes the yellow look of urine) which is very toxic to cell tissue. But, if you consume enough extra protein that your blood goes into supersaturation for urea, the urea will begin to settle out of the blood throughout the body into cell tissue, especially in the joints of your lower extremities, and, if not cleared out soon enough, the urea will break down into uric acid causing cell damage and even death, a medical condition known as gout. Basically, like all dietary myths, anyone taking in too much protein is actually causing damage and not helping at all.
Even for a marathon athletes, you only increase nutritional requirements for all nutrients other than salt, water, and calories for the body by a maximum of 50% over that of a average person. When you increase the diet for any athlete, you increase the nutritional consumption by many times as much. Therefore, unless you have a medical problem, even marathon athletes don't need additional nutrition beyond the increased food consumption except for calories (sugars and fats), salts (primarily potassium and table salt) and water because of increased dehydration. Unless a blood or urine tests shows you are lacking any nutrients, you shouldn't be taking any extra nutrients including protein.
Now for the little trick you can use at home to tell whether you are getting too much or too little water or protein. You just watch color and amount of your urine when you take a pee. If you have a normal amount of urine and it is a light yellow, you are getting enough water and protein. If you have a normal amount of water with clear urine, you are not getting enough protein (have a steak for dinner). If you have a normal amount of urine with very dark yellow urine, you are getting too much protein (have a salad for dinner). If you have a larger than normal amount of urine that is white, you are drinking too much water. If you get a smaller than normal amount of very dark yellow urine, you are not getting enough water. If your urine is cloudy, you have a bladder infection and need to see a doctor. Now how hard was that?
That busts the water and protein myths. Myths busted!!! :-)
What about that evil demon, table salt?
First, at least the last half dozen research projects I have seen have proved that table salt does not cause high blood pressure. Therefore, all of the scare tactics about getting rid of table salt are bogus. But not having enough table salt or sodium in your body, called hyponatremia or low sodium blood level, will kill you. A healthy sodium blood level is considered to be between 35 and 45 milli units per unit of blood. If your sodium blood level drops down below 15 milli units per unit of blood, you go into a coma and better than 90% of the people who go into that coma die.
What happens is this. In your nerve and brain cells is a little thing called a sodium pump which requires sodium or table salt to function. When that sodium pump stops working, you stop living, especially if enough of the right sodium pumps stop working in the hypothalamus which controls involuntary life functions. When your sodium blood level is between 35 and 45 milli units per unit of blood, the sodium pumps work just fine. When your sodium blood level drops down below 35 milli units, it causes the sodium in your sodium pumps to begin diffusing into the blood to bring your sodium blood level back up. This decreases the functions of the sodium pumps and the symptoms are a lack of muscle control and feeling dizzy. It gets difficult to find the ground with your feet while walking or to even stand up.
If you reach that point, drink a medium size bottle of Gatorade (just swallow it), or eat a couple of salt tablets, or take in at least a teaspoon of table salt very quickly to get your sodium blood level back up. If you don't get your sodium blood level back up at that point and your sodium blood level drops below 15 milli units per unit of blood, you are in serious risk of going into a coma and dying from hyponatremia.
For more than a decade I have been watching increasing numbers of people dying from hyponatremia because our media have scared them into going on a low or no salt diet. This usually happens when they go out for a hike or bike ride on a hot day with low salt blood levels because they increase their sweating and loss of salt. In spite of this problem getting worse, the media keep scaring people into low or no salt diets increasing the number of deaths from hyponatremia.
I have found that, for a sedentary person, normal amounts of salt with a little extra for flavoring will keep your sodium blood level between 35 and 45 milli units. For athletes, they will get more salt when they increase their food consumption plus adding a little for flavoring. If you workout on hot days, especially while wearing hot equipment like football uniforms, you better take salt tablets. Myth busted!!!
Just in case you have not noticed the pattern in all of this, it is that fad exercises, foods, and diets cause harm and death. If the media are hyping any exercise or diet, stay away from it and keep to the basics I have taught you. Their fads are unhealthy and will kill you. Personally, I will not consume anything which is low or no salt, sugar, or fat and especially not anything labeled diet. I have shown you that salt, sugar, and fat are not unhealthy for you unless you don't exercise right but the things they put into these foods to replace the salt, sugar, and fat so the food will taste good, we have no idea what those chemicals will do to you and they keep finding out that this one or that one kills or causes terrible health problems. Why risk it? Just eat and exercise right.
In the Bible, God very clearly says, "You will work six days per week and will rest one day per week." I find it absolutely amazing how many people do not hear the first half of that commandment where God says you WILL work or exercise six days per week. They only hear the second half which says you will rest one day per week. If you don't work or exercise six days per week, why do you need a rest day? Just what are you recovering from?
The truth is that, if you don't exercise six days per week, your body will get unhealthy, you will get sick, and you won't be able to perform whatever job God has for you to do as well. Basically, you will be letting God down because you didn't take good care of the body God loaned you for your brief stay on this planet. How would you feel if you loaned me a vehicle and I didn't take good care of it and trashed it? I bet you would get a little mad, wouldn't you? God said we are His stewards of everything on this planet including the bodies he loans us.
That is the nutshell version of good fitness or health.
It is always time to....