ONCE A DANCER, ALWAYS A DANCER! Just keep up!
You often hear the saying "Movement is medicine" in today’s regular talk about exercise and health. It really sums up how we see physical activity in today’s world—where most of the western society spends hours sitting still just to get through work and take care of life’s responsibilities. But if this is the case, the road towards those eagerly waited golden retirement years might end up being short and bumpy. If we treat exercise, not like a lifelong companion, but like a prescription pill, it might feel like a poison when everything you’ve taken for granted has already started crumbling. If your physical fitness starts falling apart by your forties, you're not dancing toward retirement—you’re crawling.
From a public health point of view, treating movement as a mandatory dose just to keep the society functioning doesn’t really support long-term well-being or help working people stay strong mentally or physically. In the long run, even the ability of working people to pay taxes could take a hit—especially if joint and muscle problems lead to other issues, like a serious drop in other health metrics like for instance your maximum oxygen uptake.
Right now, the average working person who does a bit of Nordic walking can handle about six hours of physical work a day before running out of steam. But for many, their VO₂ max (how much oxygen your body can use) is only a third of what it could be with some consistent training.
When just keeping your basic metabolism going starts to feel like a workout, the health benefits of exercise might not even show up anymore. You can’t rely on your aerobic system alone to burn calories if your resting heart rate is constantly through the roof and getting out of bed feels like it might trigger a heart attack—or a full-blown angel choir in your ears.
At that point, it’s worth asking yourself: Am I okay with who I am as is, or could I be okay with slightly better cholesterol levels and blood pressure too? Sometimes, it’s harder to change our habits and attitudes than our genes. But even though you can’t change your genetics, the choices you make every day can still influence how those genes affect your life. And if you were born as a dancer, just keep dancing. You were born with a gift that keeps giving if you continue to use it.
