The more miles you drive a car, the more prone it is to breaking down or having mechanical issues. I’m struggling to see how constant exercise like daily 5 mile runs doesn’t add “wear and tear” to the body.
In: 7
it does add wear and tear, but if you rest your body rebuilds stronger than it was. if you are only working and never resting then you will end up with injuries o plenty
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You strengthen your body by breaking it ever so slightly, and then the cells respond by making themselves ever so slightly stronger to survive that experience that damaged them. Over time, you become stronger.
A car cannot rebuild and fix itself, so it doesn’t fully compare.
Eventually, when you’re older, your body and cells struggle to bounce back and rebuild the same way it did when you were young
Exercise does not directly strengthen your body. It wears down the body. Every time you exercise, you are causing tiny amounts of damage to your body in various ways.
What’s strengthening you is *your own body*.
Our body has the mechanisms to build up muscle, strengthen bone, etc. However, our bodies are “lazy” – by default, the systems conserve as much energy as they can.
If we had magic control over our cell mechanisms, we could just tell our body to “grow muscle” and it would do that. But we don’t have that kind of perfect control.
What we do instead is activate the body’s signals. When you exercise, the body will “detect” that – and respond by spending energy to build up the affected muscles etc.
Cars, of course, have nothing like that; there’s no system inside of a car that constantly rebuilds it.
Your body can adapt to injury.
For a small cut, it heals up as if nothing happens. For a larger cut, it’ll scar up and be harder to cut in that area.
Your body was engineered by nature to be used, not to sit around eight hours a day for thirty years straight. When your heart and skeletal muscles aren’t used on a regular basis they start to weaken, because muscle takes energy to maintain and if you aren’t using it, you’re going to lose it. Having a weaker heart has an obvious impact on your health, but if you have a weak back or weak legs lifting injuries can occur much more easily.
If you aren’t overweight and you use appropriate gear you can minimize joint damage from higher impact sports, but there are other ways of exercising that aren’t as hard on your joints, like cycling.
Basically, humans evolved in a way which means that our joints (and other bodily functions) are coupled with the idea that we get alot of movement each day. Our joints degrade when we dont use them. When we do, they stay “fresh” and “in shape”. If we use them just enough but not too much, they will both get enough movement to maintain full function while also not getting damaged too much to be beyond repair. The perfect balance of daily activity is one where the body gets stressed, but not too much so. Similiarly, exercise actually CAN destroy the body. Lifting too often will damage your muscles as they cannot recover quick enough. Lifting too much will wear your joints down faster than they can adapt and regenrate. Stressing your bones too much (martial arts as example) will cause them to break instead of causing micro-fractures, which heal and strengthen the bone.
The body is built to withstand and thrive under a certain “load”. If you do too little, the body doesnt get to use all the “functions” it has, and those functions will degrade over time, like joint mobility for example. If you use them too much, they will break down. one good example are shoulder, knee and back injuries in landscaping or construction workers, they are constantly hauling heavy things, holding stuff over their heads when pruning / cutting trees, kneeling down on hard surfaces etc. These are all stresses that exceed what our bodies are supposed to be able to handle (humans in the past didn’t exactly lift bags of concrete to survive) so it will cause the joints to fail faster than in people who are not subjected to such difficult manual labor
There’s a lot of good points here but one thing is missing. Exercise also improves blood flow, just by moving you are forcing blood to move around your body, which brings nutrients and oxygen to places that don’t get much blood flow when you’re laying around.
Your car doesn’t repair itself, your body does. And moreover, your body repairs itself better and faster and stronger when it’s stressed. Que the Daft Punk.
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