With the development of society and lifestyle changes, most people spend their time sitting or laying down.
This will lead to weight gain, spinal problems, muscle strain etc. So Traditional Chinese Medicine encourage more exercises, sweats and improve blood circulation, aiming to improve health and reduce diseases.
“Practitioner, I’m not sitting all day working, I also keep moving and sweating.”
“Practitioner, I do house chores everyday, isn’t that enough ?”
Whenever I discuss exercise with patients, above are the responses from them. Constantly move around, busy with various activities, tired and sweats a lot, but their body are not getting stronger, in fact, they feel more tired over time.
It is labour if physical effort needed in work requirements or daily activities.
Labor is not the same as exercise and couldn’t be replaced.Although both require physical effort, sweat, physical strength may also be enhanced over time, but they are still different.
Most people may not pay attention to their postures and muscle proper positioning, resulting unbalance muscle strain, leading to muscle damage and loss balance.
For an example, cleaning usually involve prolonged bending and continuous exertion of arms with other muscles having minimal involvement.
However, exercise requires muscle coordination from whole body, such as leg muscles for jogging, arm swinging for balancing, natural back straightening to prevent body to sway. Therefore, exercise need involvement from muscles in body.
During exercise, we warm up to gradually increase heart rate and prepare the body for next steps reducing injury.
But labour often involves sudden burst of energy, such as lifting object, less people warm up before lifting especially in work-related situations.
Sudden acceleration of heart rate can lead to rapid increase in blood pressure, causing damage to cardiovascular system.
As mentioned earlier, exercising is to improve health condition, strengthen the body and improve mental well-being.
Purpose of labour is to accomplish task, involving more responsibilities and pressures, phycological impact of two are different.
From TCM perpectives, stress affect flow of ‘Qi’, if ‘Qi’ stagnanted, blood circulation slow down, leading to various diseases over time.
Everyone’s lifestyle and body condition are different, some people can maintain exercise alongside with their work, some struggle to do so due to physical demands of their job. In such cases, you need to find the exercise that suit you as it is not essential to go gym or sweat a lot to be counted as exercise. Suitable form of exercise requires considerations of various factors like body condition, goal, interests, lifestyle and expertise.
No matter which exercise or goal, one should not rush into it, the progression should gradual.
Especially people who seldom exercise, starting with light, low heart rate exercise (like jogging, Qi Gong, cycling etc.), 20-30 minutes everytime, once to twice per week. Maintain 1 month and when your body get used to this tempo, increase the duration and intensity of exercise, when your body get used to it fully then you just explore more challenging activities (like sports or climbing etc).
Moderate exercise should leave a person pleasantly tired and interested with it. If exercise leads to severe shortness of breath, chest discomfort, extreme fatigue, fear or aversion to the activities, you might need to readjust the duration and intensity of exercise.
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