To express optimal health and well-being, every one of the two hundred trillion cells in your body needs a constant supply of oxygen. Oxygen is not only essential for the cells and helps produce great amounts of energy, it also sets your body up to defend itself against cancer and other degenerative diseases. Therefore, you must exercise.

Moving your body is also essential for the health of the nervous system. Your spine requires movement. Sitting all day is one of the worst things for your spine – sitting is to the spine as sugar is to the teeth. Proper movement is essential to all life. Not only does it nourish your body with oxygen, it also feeds the cerebellum through proprioceptive (movement sensation) input from the body. The combination of oxygen and proprioceptive nourishment supercharge your body’s natural energy stores, enhancing health and vitality naturally. If you want a healthy brain, you have to move your body. “Ninety percent of the stimulation and nutrition to the brain is generated by the movement of the spine,” notes Dr. Roger Sperry, Nobel Prize recipient for brain research. He also states, “This would be analogous to a windmill generating electricity.”

Hundreds of years ago, it was common for people to walk ten, fifteen, even twenty miles a day. Today, people are reluctant to get off the couch or out of their car.

Neurologically, two things happen as you move your body: mechanoreception and nocioception. When the spine moves, it fires off neurons called mechanoreceptors. Mechanoreceptors are like nourishment for your brain. The mechanoreceptors fire off good information to the brain as you exercise, so mechanoreception helps develop a healthy state of mind.

Here’s how it works: The positive messages are fired into the cerebellum. The cerebellum is the part of the brain that controls coordination, posture, movement, intelligence, learning, and memory. The cerebellum coordinates all those functions to maximize attention span and focus. The cerebellum takes the messages it receives and fires those messages into various areas of the brain such as the amygdala, which is the stress and anxiety area, and the locus cereleus, which is another anxiety area. The cerebellum also fires messages into the hippocampus, which is the memory center, and also the hypothalamus, which is the hormone control system of the body.

If your spine is out of alignment due to subluxation, improper information is sent to the cerebellum. If you impair cerebellar development, or cerebellar plasticity, then you reduce brain-body potential. In the chiropractic profession, we are thankful for people such as Dr. James Chestnut, who has synthesized exhaustive research in the field of neurology and physiology and has done an excellent job in linking
the two to performance and potential.

When you move your body and spine, it fires good messages into your cerebellum, your memory centers, your hormonal system, and your stress anxiety centers. Through exercise, stress and anxiety are reduced, and both short and long term memory is improved. Also, the hypothalamus releases good hormones that are beneficial to your whole body. The brain produces good messages that are then sent back down your spinal cord and out through the spinal nerves to all organs of the body, delivering a greater level of health, energy, and vitality.

When you don’t move, your spine locks up. Muscle degeneration and neurological degeneration begins, inflammation starts to develop, and ligaments, tendons, joints, and discs begin to malfunction. Everything starts degenerating rapidly. The nerves in those areas of the spine that are locked up and subluxated start firing bad messages, or what is called nocioception, to the cerebellum. This does the exact opposite of what exercise does for you, affecting not only posture, balance, coordination, but learning, attention, focus, memory, and feelings of wellbeing. This bad information going into the cerebellum ultimately will produce disease and sickness. On a neurological level, the implications of exercise are enormous. There are few things you can do for your health that will have the phenomenal benefits that exercise does.

There are a lot of reasons people don’t exercise. Mainly, they don’t understand that it is vitally important for more than just weight loss. They don’t really know where to start.

Our culture promotes laziness. We want to make things as easy as possible and as fast as possible with as little work as possible. People say they don’t have time to exercise, but it doesn’t take a lot of time. I’m going to share with you how to do exercise routines in as little as three or four minutes per day, three times a week, so that time is really not an excuse.

Another excuse people use for not exercising is that they don’t have the energy. But remember, exercise generates energy. As exercise moves oxygen into your body, it produces positive neurological input in your brain; you’re actually gaining energy. Sitting around doing nothing leaves you feeling lethargic, and that won’t change until you move. Another excuse is that exercise hurts. If people already have joint pain, they don’t want to move any more than they have to. But as you move your body, joints become lubricated. Oxygenation created by movement assists in transporting waste out of the joints and moving nutrients in, so the joints actually work better over time. It may be painful at first, but soon you’ll be moving better and have less pain in your joints. There are few medical conditions that would make exercise a contraindication. Combining exercise with proper hydration and nutrition also contributes toward joint lubrication.

I’m certain that if people really understood all the benefits of exercising, they’d be doing it. Not exercising makes your immune system weaker, depletes your memory and ages your brain faster, and who wants that?

TO EXERCISE OR NOT TO EXERCISE, that is the question.

When you don’t move your body, your blood vessels become weaker and thinner. Blood pressure has to go up, because as the heart gets weaker it has to pump more times per minute to circulate the same amount of blood. When blood pressure goes up, the immune system crashes, the cells get less oxygen, and there is more chance of developing cancer. The brain is also heavily affected because it relies on heavy levels of oxygen; if it’s not getting this oxygen, neurons start dying off rapidly, which is how neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and multiple sclerosis develop, as well as a range of other mental disorders. Exercise is absolutely critical, especially for the immune system, brain function, and heart function. Exercise boosts your brain and may reverse brain decay. Research suggests that regular aerobic exercise may delay or even reverse age-related brain decline, including that associated with Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. The nitric oxide that is released as a result of exercise serves as a vasodilator (artery expander), allowing the arteries to deliver greater quantities of oxygen and nutrients to the brain. According to a review of studies in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, “Moderate physical exercise (anything that leaves you breathless), can increase both the volume of brain tissue and the brain’s ability to function.”

In a study at the University of Kansas Medical Center, researchers found that patients with early Alzheimer’s who worked out regularly showed less deterioration in the areas of the brain linked to memory than more sedentary patients with the disease. Other studies indicated that high levels of physical fitness have a positive effect on mental plasticity, or the brain’s capacity for growth and development.

Exercise also counteracts the effects of aging, increases lifespan, and improves bone function. There is lesschance of developing osteoporosis, and so as you age, your body is in better condition. Research at Penn State and Johns Hopkins reported in USA Today in 2004 showed that exercise was significantly more important than calcium intake for developing and keeping bones strong. One of the main causes of death in the elderly is falls that cause breakage of a hip or a bone, which then requires surgery and drugs, or can be fatal. If you’re improving brain function, which exercise is proven to do, coordination is improved, so you reduce the chance of falling. If you do fall, your neuromuscular skeletal system is in better condition and you’ll be able to absorb the impact of the fall and recover faster. Vestibular (balance) problems are created by interference in the central nervous system. Because falls are the leading cause of accidental death among the elderly, chiropractic care for the reduction of central nervous system interference and cerebellar (balance) health is a potential lifesaver.

So a quick quote to sum up the information: “Those who think they have not time for bodily exercise will sooner or later have to find time for illness.” -Edward Stanley, former prime minister of the United Kingdom.

For more life changing information go to Lake Mary Chiropractor or call 407-333-2277.