So you don’t want to be a gym bunny. Running on a treadmill going nowhere. People with serious faces and hard flat bellies eyeballing each other in a lunarscape environment. Where is the love in that?

Doing exercise is best and most beneficial when you are in communication with other people and the natural environment. With a little imagination exercise can be the key to greater quality of life and happiness.

Not only can regular exercise help protect you from heart disease and strokes, high blood pressure, non-insulin dependent diabetes, obesity, back pain, osteoporosis, and can improve your mood and help you to better manage stress. It will also put your mind back in touch with that amazingly efficient instrument called the human body.

After all, we have hunter/gatherer instincts and the human body is not designed for sitting down. Mind/body interaction leads to clarity of focus and greater understanding of how you fit into the world around you.

Maybe you could take up Caporeira, the afro-Brazilian dance art form, and learn to flex and move your muscles like a panther? Or you could go swimming naked in the great outdoors and enliven your circulation by plunging into ice cold water? How about running in the local park, feeling the flow of your heart beat as you dodge the benches and hurdle over the old ladies? What about bull-running in Pamplona? Or am I getting a little carried away?

Whatever form it takes, when you exercise endorphins are released from the pituitary gland, which then bind to opioid receptors in the brain. They have an antagonistic effect on the receptors and therefore block the release of neurotransmitter molecules from the nerve terminal ensuring that no pain signals reach the brain.

Thus the endorphins have an analgesic effect, and their release results in a state of euphoria. As well as reducing pain this also aids in the reduction of stress.

So there you have it. Not only can exercise open up your senses and introduce you to a world of possibilities it can also make you as high as a kite.

By: Andy