Building a Better Future through Regular Exercise | Aleksandar Marchev | TEDxYouth@SWA
URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHd5pY0FLtY Video ID: LHd5pY0FLtY ============================================================ [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] Good morning ladies and gentlemen. My name is Alex and I'm a business management and INS teacher here at SWA middle school high school for eight years. I'm here to talk to you about a topic which I think it's worth discussing for a variety of reasons, but above all because it has tremendous implications for our future and for the future of humanity. Now, how many of you have heard that exercise is important? Okay. Well, that's great. Does that mean I should stop right now? Hope not. Um, it turns out the knowledge about the benefits of exercise is nothing new. The ancients knew about this powerful tool. And I have two quotes behind me, one from Socrates and one from John Loach. and they very eloquently capture the importance, the significance and the magnitude that exercise can play in our lives. Socrates says that it's a shame to grow old without being able to see what you're capable of and testing your limits. And John Lock says that the mantra of sound mind in a sound body no is a short description of the happiness state in this world and I couldn't agree with those more but that's not the only reason why I want to talk to you about we all have our life aspirations we all want to achieve certain things in life whether it be professional or personal. We want to grow a business. We want to have a career. We want to see our children thrive, succeed, and grow up. And that's great. And whether we realize it or not, what we are after is the pursuit of happiness. Now, one thing that we usually forget about and don't think too much of is what is fundamental to achieving those goals. And that is our health, our physical ability to perform in order to achieve the things that we aspire to do. and specifically what's the importance of being physically fit in order to be healthy. Now there is a saying that goes that the best ability that we have is availability and I couldn't agree with it more because what could be more important than just showing up. You could be the world's greatest expert at any given field. However, if you are not physically able to show up, share your experience, you would have no impact. So, the most important thing that often gets left behind is our physical health and ability to perform, not just now, but for the future. So, we can transfer our knowledge, experiences to the generations that follow behind us. Now what is the problem? Let's see the whole scene. One of the unquestionable realities that we experience is the fact that we as a society are living longer. The life expectancy of the average human has increased exponentially and currently in developed countries it's about 80 to 85 years and that's a good thing. Living longer is usually considered good. Now, the number of people that will be above 65 and over, according to the UN, will double in the next 25 years. So, think about this for a second. There will be two times more people aged 65 and over in the next 25 years. I will be one of those people and probably some of you as well. And so we will be living longer. But the question then is are we going to live healthier? And this is the age-old question of quantity versus quality. So because of the advances mostly in modern medicine and eradication of contagious diseases, vaccines and all kinds of medical advancements, we are living longer but are we living healthier? And unfortunately the last diagram behind me shows that on average in developed countries adults aging adults spend the last 6 to 10 years of their lives in a state which we call disabled. And I find this disturbing and I find this unfortunate. And this is part of the reason why I wanted to talk to you about. I had a personal experience last year. My father of 80 years old passed away. He was reasonably fit but unfortunately he got a stroke and he spent the last nine months of his life in a bed. And it wasn't a pleasant experience to say the least. But it got me thinking about is there something more that could have uh he could have done to give us those nine months but in a better state in a state where we could communicate where he would suffer less. Um and in fact there is and that is what I want to talk to you about and as you already know from the title of my talk it's about exercise. So we are going to talk about why it's important. Not just stating the mere fact but understanding on a deeper level why it's absolutely fundamental for us to engage in regular exercise consistently. The man that you see behind me is a reconstruction of one of us. This is a man that lived in what we call modern day Ethiopia today, 160,000 years ago. He was the same species as us homo sapiens. And maybe if you see this man after a visit to the barber, maybe a nice suit on the street, you would think he's one of us. But there is something profoundly different about how this man lived. And not just him, generations for thousands and hundreds of thousands of years of our own species lived like this. So what was life like that back then? Well, on average, people took between 15 and 20,000 steps per day. 15 to 20,000. Obviously, it's an estimate. Do you know what the average step count is in Indonesia today for an average person? Any guesses? 5,000 is a good guess, but it actually it's worse than that. It's less than 4,000. Actually, 3,500. And that places Indonesia is number one with the least steps in the world. That was a survey by Stanford University by the way. So I think it's pretty credible. Now that man also had to probably hunt, carry things. He had to be physically fit. Not because he had to post his pictures on Instagram uh and show off on Straa, but because this was about survival. If he was not physically fit and everybody else in his tribe, we wouldn't be here. We survived because we evolved to move in a variety of ways and we are physically and cognitively robust. And walking by the way is one of our superpowers and it's greatly undervalued. We are bipedo. That separates us from many other species and it's a good start in case you are considering how to start your exercise journey. So, one of the simplest things we can all do is track our step counts and try to slowly increase those. But we are not going to talk about how to exercise. That is important. We're still going to focus on the why. Now, when you engage in regular exercise, you are going to experience benefits. Those benefits are disproportionate to the amount of time and effort that you will put in. And in business management, we often talk about concepts such as compounding, risk management, assets. Health is the greatest assets that we can have. We already mentioned that availability is one of our greatest greatest abilities. Another business management concept that we can apply apply to health is that of risk management and how we can manage our health risks. And we see that reasonably fit individuals, this is what the data behind me is for, have a very substantial decrease in all kinds of diseases and factors that affect our health. So during the pandemic, 54% decrease in the chance of hospitalization. We have decreases in one of the most prevalent diseases of our time such as diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, dementia and many others and a 31% decrease in all cause mortality. What this means is that if you are reasonably fit, not an extreme athlete, you decrease your chance of dying of any cause in the next year by 31%. Now, imagine if there was a pill that could do that for us. I mean, the company that invents that pill will be probably bigger than Tesla, right? But isn't it better that we have this at our disposal for virtually free? Now a very important question that we need to ask ourselves is how do we want to age? In other words, imagine the last decade of your life and think about five maybe 10 activities that you would like to be able to do. I can share some of the activities that I'd like to be able to do. I'd like to open a jar. I'd like to be able to load my suitcase in a plane. I'd like to be able to travel independently, go up and downstairs. And I would assume you would like to be able to do those things as well. Now we are easily at least most of us able to do those things now but that's not going to stay with us forever. And then let's see what the progression is likely going to look like. The chart behind me includes 120 thousand puh participants in a survey which were divided into four different cohorts. those that were considered out of shape, reasonably fit, fit, and those that were considered to be athletes. Now, they were not necessarily actual athletes is their physical state was deemed as such. And this is specifically about cardiorespiratory fitness as measured by V2 max. I'm not going to go into the details of V2 max, but just remember that it's a measure of cardiorespiratory fitness. And what we can see here is that we could have 50 year old athletes. So that means people that have consistently and regularly exercised which are as fit as teenagers. And this is what describes biological age. So this is where we have a discrepancy between our chronological age and our biological age. And this is what exercise can do for us when it comes down to muscular endurance, strength, and power. We have an example of an individual that was reasonably fit. Actually, he was more than reasonably fit. He was able to do 33 pull-ups. He was a gymnast, right? So it was he was a highly trained individual. when he was a teenager. Then life got in the way and he didn't exercise for about 20 years. Picked up exercise again at the age of 40. Was able to regain his pull-up record of 33 pull-ups. at the age of 46, continued to exercise and then at the age of 74 was still able to crank out 20 pull-ups. Now, I don't know how many of you have tried a pull-up. Um, I've done a few myself and I can tell you that's very impressive. And no, I'm not telling that you should be doing pull-ups. There's probably better exercises that fit you more. But the point that I'm making is that even in old age, we can make a substantial difference that can impact our chronological age. Now, what we want to do is move from the seditary curve to the trained curve of individual. And what this will do for us is on average add between 5 and 10 healthy years to our lifespan whatever it is. And this is one of the greatest benefits that exercise can do. So, it can not only prolong our lives, but it can also make those last decades of our lives when we're most susceptible to disease productive, healthy, and meaningful. The benefits of exercise are numerous. We can there is a study after study after study that keeps coming out which tells us it is the single most powerful intervention that we can do for our health. It can prevent and largely slow down the diseases of abundance such as diabetes or cardiovascular disease. It can boost our productivity and it's great for our mental health. And in fact, mental health was the main reason why I got into exercise, at least into running. And this happened during the pandemic. I was feeling restless, being stuck at home, you know, kind of like a caged animal. So, I needed to go out and I was exercising pretty regularly, going to the gym, but the gyms were closed. So, I decided to go out and run. And I'll share one experience I had. But before we get there, let's first look at some of the most common misconceptions about exercise which prevent us from engaging in it. The first one is that's expensive. And this couldn't be further than the truth. Yes, it can be expensive. Gym membership, coaches, trainers, you could be buying the latest shoes. So yeah, that will cost you some money. But you can also slip on your trainers that you probably have somewhere at home and go for a jog or a walk. You could get a jumping rope. It virtually cost nothing. You can do body weightight exercises. So cost is not a reason not to exercise. The second and probably the most common excuse is that it takes time. And that's actually true. Exercise can take time. But it's one of the greatest investments of time that you can ever make. In fact, according to research, for every hour of exercise, you're gaining three extra hours. So, one to three ratio. There is rarely investments that are not scam that are as good as this one. Right? And when you think that you don't have time to exercise and you don't do it, you're actually taking time away from those activities that really interest you. Another important thing to remember is that sometimes we get over excited about exercise. we engage in it and we're so enthusiastic that we forget to pace oursself and to have an honest assessment of where we stand. So, we injure ourselves, right? And we're sidelined for a long time or even worse, we never want to exercise before. Sometimes we're in a hurry. We don't warm up and then injuries happen. Now, if you don't have time to warm up, I would suggest you just warm up and call it a day. It's still going to be much better for you than going out pushing yourself too hard and then being silent for a very very very long time. I have a number of friends, the so-called weekend warriors that are very busy and probably they are during the week and they exercise on the weekend. They go out to play soccer or basketball and half of them have ACL or miniscus tears and their ability to exercise now is greatly limited and that goal of engaging in exercise for improving health is now very difficult to achieve. So that is something that we need to be mindful for and prevent as much as we can. And last but not least in terms of what exercise can be thought of, the mind process behind it is not we are not exercising for a result. Although you see one behind me, I'm going to talk about it in a second. We are exercising for life. That should be the reason and your motivation. you're exercising to be there at your kids's wedding uh to pick up your grandchild to be able to share precious moments with them and I think that should be a very powerful motivation. Now I told you I picked up exercise during the pandemic mindfully and what it has done for me is quite extraordinary. I started really slow. I did some mistakes, was lucky to avoid injuries, was really interested, but one of the things I had on my bucket list was to climb Ringani Mountain in Lombok. Uh I remember seeing it from the shore in Bali, this majestic peak. Uh and later on I found out that there is actually a race called the Rejani 100, which is an ultra endurance race. uh I participated in it and it was one of the most profound and transformative experiences in my life. This is a picture from the top. So I was able to make it all the way up there. It was the most beautiful um sunrise that I've ever seen after going up to 3,700 meters the whole night. Um this is another picture there which um looks like Lord of the Rings but it's real. Um and that's me close to the caldera of the volcano there. And the most profound thing was that during the race I really tested my limits. I couldn't finish the race though. I'd like to tell you this right. So out of the 100 kilometers I ran I was able to finish about 53. I was extremely exhausted beyond I could ever imagine. But I was happy. I felt fulfilled. I knew I've given it all out there. I met some amazing people. I saw views that I had never even imagined. And I experienced kindness that I never thought was possible. on one of the water stations. I forgot to refill my water bottles. And this was towards the end of the race. It was the second night. So, I hadn't slept for more than 20 hours. It's second night. It's dark. There's forest around me. I'm not sure if I'm hallucinating. And I'm out of water. And I'm thinking, should I go back? How far is back? My phone battery was running out. And I was very, very thirsty. Um, and then out of the blue, I saw a group of children, teenagers that were camping, and they were kind enough to give me a bottle of water. They could probably tell how desperate I was. They didn't even ask me. And let me tell you, that was the best tasting water that I've ever had and one of the kindest things that someone has ever done for me. So I wouldn't have been able to have these experiences without the fitness to think and engage in these activities. But let me leave you out with this. The main reason for us to exercise is not exercise itself but the numerous benefits that I tried to highlight here. They extend beyond the physical and mental side. They can be those precious moments that you spend with your kids and you reminisce about when we are old. The most important thing you need to remember is to stay consistent in your pursuit, to play the game and to stay in the game, to manage your expectations and to have a very strong why. Ask yourself, why am I lacing up my running shoes? Why am I putting on my yoga suit? And I think when you find your why, motivation will be easy. I think the risk to reward from exercise is beyond comparison. It gives us so much and requires a little bit of time and effort. So if we want to truly advance humanity, we must leave this legacy to our children, lead by example, and make sure they follow in our footsteps. Thank you very much for this opportunity, and I hope to see you again soon. [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music]