I like to live my life by a few sayings I’ve heard over the years, and one of my personal favourites is ‘use it or lose it.’ I think the reasoning behind why this one in particular is one of my top choices involves the notion that it can be applied to just about anything in life.
For the sake of this post, however, I am going to narrow the scope of relativity of this specific saying and apply it to fitness and exercise.
I’ve always been an active person. I was involved with sports from a young age, and once I was in my teens, I started going to the gym with my mom. My mom has always been very active, so I think my exercise interest stems from her; she is in her 60s and is still extremely active.
I don’t regret becoming active so early on in life because I think it has helped me more than anything, especially with my current health problems. I was actually told by one doctor that the reason my Lyme isn’t any worse than it already is results from me living an active life, both with exercise and sports, and working on the farm.
Something I didn’t realize, though, when I started regularly exercising at a young age, is that in order to maintain muscle mass and cardiovascular abilities and endurance, you have to keep up with the exercise and fitness; otherwise, it won’t stay with you for nearly as long as you may have hoped. Hence the expression ‘use it or lose it.’
I don’t necessarily know if some people realize that once they begin their fitness journey, they have to be consistent and keep up with it if they want their hard-earned results to stick around for a while. Fitness is earned, and then maintained, and it won’t be patient and wait around for us when we decide to take a break for a while.
Photo by Rachel Moore on Unsplash
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