People Who Keep Exercising As They Age Swear By These 10 Powerful Mind-Body Benefits
Mikhail Nilov | Pexels Regular exercise has been proven time and time again to be one of the simplest, most important things anyone can do to create superhuman health, longevity, and brainpower. But as trends in gym memberships show year after year, it also seems to be the hardest habit to develop and stick with regularly.
Why is that? Most often, it’s because our motivations for working out are usually strictly superficial. We just want to look better, be more confident, and feel like our bodies aren’t going downhill as the years go by. But vanity alone isn’t enough to make you put in the consistent effort required to get results. When the desire to exercise is rooted in something deeper than looking good, you’ll tap into a far more profound fuel source to propel your commitment to getting fit.
When it becomes a practice of personal development, meditation, and undisputedly upgrading every area of your life, it gets easier and easier to organically want to make the time to break a sweat. A self-fulfilling prophecy of an upward spiral begins to occur.
Because, really, people who keep exercising as they age swear it makes for better everything: better mind-body benefits, better intimacy, better brain, better digestion, better moods, better decisions, better relationships, better impact, better aging, and an overall better life.
People who keep exercising as they age swear by these 10 powerful mind-body benefits:
1. Having more patience
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Our modern world is training us for instant gratification and automatic everything (swipe right to a new significant other in the next 24 hours, get your groceries delivered to you within two hours). If you’re wired to expect changes and benefits in a week, you’re being set up for chronic frustration and a mediocre life.
Staying engaged with exercise keeps you grounded in the real pace of life. It reminds you that the best things grow over time and require regular tending, like a garden. Life happens, and things rarely go according to plan. What you think will take 2-3 months might take a year or more.
To win and feel fulfilled in the long game, you have to stay flexible (mentally and physically) and let life unfold in its own time. This isn’t to say you shouldn’t be consistently taking action. It just means you need to adjust your expectations and stay engaged without giving up.
I would have never worked up to doing a backflip if I had gone off of how bad my first training session was. I was ridiculously sore and felt completely useless for two full weeks after day one of training. Now, I feel like a champion and can smile knowing I have that accomplishment under my belt for the rest of my life. Patience pays off in perpetuity.
2. Overcoming your mind
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This is probably the biggest stumbling block for anyone who’s starting a workout routine. Your brain doesn’t actually want to change. It’s made to protect you and operate within learned boundaries.
The mere act of engaging in regular exercise is already a huge win. It’s an act of defiance against mental laziness and the suffocating limits of your comfort zone. How many times have you given in to this voice:
- “Ugh, I’m just so tired/sore. I’ll do it tomorrow.”
- “Hmm... I don’t have that much time. I’ll probably feel even worse later if I go for a run right now anyway. It’s probably better I get a little more sleep instead.”
- “This week is so busy. I just don’t have the time.”
- “It’s been such a long day. I deserve to kick back and have a drink.”
Whatever it actually says to you, you know the feeling I’m talking about. We all create our own rationalizations to negotiate and bargain our way out of following through on what we say we want, just because it takes a little more effort than we’re used to putting in.
Once you overcome that initial barrier, while you’re actually engaged in exercise, you then have to confront that voice all over again, while it’s constantly telling you when to quit and where your limit is.
- “15... 16... Okay, let’s stop at 20 pushups. That’s plenty for now. Plus, you’re just not feeling 100 percent today.”
- “Ah, that’s starting to feel uncomfortable. Just let up and go back to a light jog. At least I’m here running in the first place.”
When you tell that voice to shut up and push through, you’ll constantly be shocked at what you’re really capable of. Training yourself to push this voice aside transforms your entire life, not just your max lifts and run times.
In no way am I saying to ignore your body’s real-time limits. You should always listen to and calibrate your training intensity to the feedback your body gives you. But if it is your mind’s 24/7 chatter that is having you lean back from leaning into your growth edges, then you must be honest with yourself about that, and push back against the internal lazy critic.
Building a business takes work. Sticking in a relationship and having hard conversations takes work. Pursuing your dreams takes work. Literally anything that puts you out of your comfort zone or requires work will summon that same voice that tells you to quit on the treadmill or squat rack. Practicing this single skill will turn you into a completely unrecognizable person after a year or two.
3. Cultivating discipline
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To expand on overcoming your mind, showing up to work out cultivates discipline. Discipline is the quality of grit and consistency that has you sticking to a routine, or long-term plan, and tackling things even when you don’t feel like doing it.
Most people sit around waiting for motivation to help them accomplish something. But motivation comes and goes. Discipline is the workhorse that digs in and gets stuff done, no matter what.
The trait of discipline is invaluable and built over time by continuously practicing the last point of overcoming your mind. After a while, it becomes a built-in reflex, and you’re left with the muscle of discipline. According to ex-Navy Seal commander Jocko Willink: Discipline = Freedom.
Creating a sustainable feeling of freedom in our lives requires work and planning. Sometimes you have to sacrifice something in the present to create an amazing situation in the future.
The ability to delay gratification is a superpower that arises from discipline. This skill is necessary to create the life of your dreams or any circumstance that takes time and consistency to build (i.e., relationships, careers, hobbies, traveling, and pretty much any desirable skill).
This is why your levels of success in all areas of life will massively benefit from regular exercise. As English business magnate Richard Branson once said, “You don’t have time to not work out.” You will develop the power to commit to and follow through on plans you make, despite the changing tides of mood and fortune.
4. Nurturing better intimacy
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Exercise boosts your love life in so many ways. We don’t often think of it in terms of fitness, but good intimacy requires cardiovascular endurance, a little flexibility, and general strength. If you want to make it last longer, be more intense, and more interesting, exercise is the highest leverage path to get there.
Working out also boosts your libido and has you craving intimacy more often, generating the initiative to make it happen. Men can especially focus on targeting big muscle groups like the legs, back, and chest. Squatting, pull-ups, and push-ups are your holy trinity of testosterone boosting.
This point becomes especially important in committed relationships. Because once the automatic honeymoon lust wears off, you’re left with the truth of your biology and relationship skills. This kind of energy isn’t a built-in, permanent fixture in a relationship. This is even more so the case as your body ages, your libido slows, and you begin producing fewer hormones. If you want a healthy, lasting love life, there’s absolutely no way around exercise.
5. Improving mobility
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Mobility includes ability, flexibility, and being pain-free. Who wants to feel like they can’t do the things they love doing? Like going for hikes, jogs, swims, play fighting, or just walking through the park.
Feeling twinges of pain constantly throughout your day interrupts your train of thought and enjoyment of the moment and makes you more prone to irritability, which degrades your quality of life and relationships.
So much of the pain and tension that interrupts our lives can be relieved or significantly decreased through exercise and some light mobility work. Even regular stretching and foam rolling still takes just as much mental effort as lifting weights. You have to make the time and endure discomfort to push through the other side and create results.
Researchers followed 75 older adults through an exercise program and watched what happened to their pain and movement. Before starting, most people rated their pain around a 5 out of 10, but after the program, their pain dropped to under a 3, and they could move their necks, shoulders, backs, hips, and knees way better than before.
6. Building greater strength capacity in life
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As you get physically stronger in the gym (or whatever you do for exercise), you simultaneously get stronger emotionally and mentally. Exercise not only helps relieve the stress that builds up in life, but it also builds toughness of every kind.
You have the background sense of knowing that you can make it through pain and discomfort. You remember that these feelings and situations are only temporary. When your mind has been trained to be resilient, flexible, and disciplined, you walk with the natural confidence that you can get through anything.
A study tracked people for several months and discovered that the folks who were physically stronger handled stress way better in their actual lives, showing much lower stress reactions when tough stuff happened. When you get physically stronger, you're also building mental toughness that helps you deal with whatever life throws at you without completely losing it.
7. Proving to yourself that you can progress
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Exercising provides a constant reminder that you can grow and change when you put in the effort. It gives you something immediately measurable to boost your confidence and fuel your forward movement in other endeavors.
When I first started working out regularly, I had a decades-old belief that I was just someone who fundamentally wasn’t able to put on muscle. Being the uber-scrawny kid in high school, this mindset ran deep for me. But after three months of consistent effort in the gym, I started to see real progress in my body.
When I started to see results in the mirror, I had this overwhelming sense of, "If I’ve been telling myself that this was an impossible task for me, and I’m clearly wrong about that, then what else in my life am I wrong about?" The realization of this all-encompassing mindset of "I am only as limited as I tell myself I am" was intensely freeing.
It’s so easy to get stuck in an old, limited self-image, or get frustrated when bigger picture things in your life aren’t changing in the ways you want them to. Commitment to exercise and expanding your athletic abilities keeps your spirit supple and prevents all those hard feelings from solidifying into a restrictive shell.
8. Improving your mental health
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The quality of your thoughts and moods (psychology) is heavily influenced by your physiology. Exercise triggers flashes of “feel-good” chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine. These boost your mood, make you feel happy, reduce pain, and improve your cognitive functioning.
This changes the way you think and make decisions, which dictates the course of your entire life. While exercise optimizes your quality of mind in the present, it also secures it for the future by stimulating the creation of new brain cells and supporting your long-term memory.
When you work out, your brain starts pumping out chemicals like dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine that instantly boost your mood and make you feel good, research findings support. But exercise doesn't just give you a quick pick-me-up but actually grows new brain cells and strengthens your memory over time, so you're not just feeling better right now but setting yourself up for better mental health years from now.
9. Having a higher quality of life
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The work you put in now will mean the difference between being a senile, couch-ridden senior or an active, healthy gem of a senior. So many people spend their best physical years burning away so they can experience freedom in the last chapters of their lives. But this lifestyle will cause both physical and spiritual decay.
Your quality of life is not only lowered by your health, but the realizations that do or don’t haunt you about how you spent your life. Did you enjoy the moment and do what you knew was best for you?
Research supports that exercise and mobility training are crucial to healthy aging on many levels. Not only will it actually slow the course of biological aging, and decrease mobility limitations, but it will also prevent the development of chronic illnesses and pain caused by an unhealthy nervous system.
10. Fending off degenerative diseases
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According to modern neuroscience, exercise is the best defense against degenerative diseases and cognitive decline, like Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, and many others. This is because working out builds up the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus in the brain, which are the key regions involved in thinking, memory, and your sense of self.
So your ability to make decisions, take care of yourself, and generally enjoy life is massively impacted by exercise. Do you really need any more reason to get sweating? Hopefully, now you have a new sense of just how profound exercise is on your entire life.
Some people say, “If you want to get swole, you gotta pay the toll.” But I say, “If you want to get swole, do it in a way that respects your body when it eventually gets old.” If you could start doing one thing today to improve your life in every single area, exercise is the answer.
While three to four 30-minute long workouts per week are the recommended minimum, you don’t have to start there. At all. If you need to, begin with just one thing you know you could do each week. Try to make it at the same time and day. Successfully developing an exercise routine should be slow, fun, and sustainable.
Maybe you do a drop-in at your local community center gym, hit a power yoga class, learn self-defense, go for a hike, jog, or do some calisthenics at home. Whatever it is, you’ll likely feel a significant difference in that part of your week, which will naturally make you want to do it more.
Gradually increase the frequency, intensity, and diversity of your exercise over time to continue growing and keep things interesting. Soon, you’ll be obsessed, and nothing will ever be the same. If you want additional thoughts on how to get in the habit of loving exercise, the book Atomic Habits by James Clear is an absolute game-changer. It goes into the specific things you need to do to make any habit easier in your life, and I single-handedly blame this book for getting me from a place of hating the gym to genuinely craving it consistently.
Jordan Gray is a five-time Amazon best-selling author, public speaker, and relationship coach with more than a decade of practice. His work has been featured in The New York Times, BBC, Forbes, The Huffington Post, Women's Health, and The Good Men Project, among countless others.
