Your Body Is AMAZING
Here are 5 amazing things about your body…
Your body heals itself.
Have you ever broke a bone? Scraped a knee? Or just got a cut? Did you have to think about creating scar tissue, calling on your cartilage, or where to direct blood flow? Nope. Your body just did it on its own. Because your body is absolutely amazing.
Your body has a built in detox system. O, and this called a liver that’s also amazing.
You don’t need that juice detox or cleanse thing. Your livers got you. Another thing that the liver also plays a role in is exercise. For instance, your liver stores glycogen. When your muscles are low on fuel because you are working so hard, your liver gives sends over some glycogen to keep them going; team work makes dream work. Glycogen breaks down to glucose, which our body makes from the carbohydrates that we eat. Our bodies literally turn food into fuel; we are machines.
Your body has built-in stress responses.
Dr. Kelly McGonigal talks about our bodies response to stress in her Ted Talk (click link to watch). She discusses how stress is not always bad thing. For instance, training is a physical stress. When you train, your body breaks down. Similar to my first point about healing, your body not only heals itself after training, but it builds itself up stronger so that it can overcome the same physical stress with less effort (this why recovery is so important)!
The piece I want to stress from Dr. McGonigal’s Ted Talk is she discusses that “stress makes us social.” She talks more about emotional stress, and discusses how stress causes us to release oxytocin, which you may know as the cuddle hormone. Our own body has mechanisms in place that cause us to seek social support when we need it. We are not supposed to bottle it up stress. Let’s stress that again - we are not supposed to bottle up stress. If you bottle it up and ignore your own body’s secretion of oxytocin, you are more likely to experience physical impairments caused by emotional stress. But, if you reach out to others, your body’s got you.
Your can control your body’s response with your breathing.
Your breath is a very powerful tool. By breathing in a more slow, controlled way, your body taps into it’s parasympathetic nervous system. This system will relax you and slow your body down. Here is an experiment for you to do next time you are in a sympathetic state and want to calm down (sympathetic nervous system is when you are in high arousal state like anger or anxiety): Breathe in, and then breathe out for at least twice as long (in for a 4 count, out for an 8 count, for example). Do this 10 times. Let me know your results.
Your body is the best place for you to experiment and research, but if you need the evidence on this one:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6479283/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK513300/
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00874/full
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs10484-015-9293-x
You are living in your body
“We are the universe experiencing itself” - Alan Watts.
Think about it. We are all star dust, all made from the same atoms and molecules, all here on Earth at the same time. Don’t even get me started on time…
To sum up, YOUR BODY IS AMAZING.
These 5 things are just scratching the surface. I could (and maybe will) go more in depth about more than 5 amazing things about each of these topics.
You don’t have to exercise, you get to exercise. You get this body, and you won’t get another one. As described in the 5 points above, your body takes care of you. Show it your appreciation by taking care of it.
If you are located in Central New Jersey, grateful for how amazing your body is, and want to show it your appreciation by strengthening and conditioning it, please fill out the form below to reach out to me.
If you are not located in Central New Jersey, but still grateful for how amazing your body is and want to show it your appreciation by strengthening and conditioning it, please fill out the form below and ask me about my remote options.
I also do graphics and videos for all y’all other coaches out there. Fill it out!
