Understanding Your Relationship with Exercise

If you ask people their favorite form of physical exercise, you’re really asking: What relationship do they have with their own body?

Some will say running—that solitary rhythm, the meditative quality of repetition, the way thought dissolves into breath. Runners often aren’t exercising; they’re processing, escaping, or finding the only hour where their mind goes quiet.

Others say swimming—the body held by water, weightless, the world muffled. It’s exercise as return to the womb, as temporary relief from gravity’s relentless pull.

Still others choose dancing, martial arts, climbing—movement as conversation, as problem-solving, as expression. These people need their exercise to mean something beyond burning calories.

And increasingly, people say walking. Just walking. The body doing what it was designed to do, at the pace it was meant to move. No optimization, no heart rate zones. Just locomotion as it’s been for millennia.

How Exercise Evolved

Historically, exercise didn’t exist as a separate category. Movement was life—hunting, gathering, building, fleeing. The body was a tool for survival, and it stayed strong through use, not through dedicated “exercise.”

The shift came with civilization. When we stopped moving to survive, we had to invent reasons to move. Ancient Greeks formalized athletics—gymnasiums, Olympic games. But even then, exercise was tied to virtue, to citizenship, to warrior training. It had purpose.

The modern concept of exercise—movement divorced from practical outcome—really emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries with industrialization. Bodies became sedentary. Exercise became compensatory, a way to fix what modern life had broken.

The 20th century turned exercise into an industry: gyms, equipment, programs, influencers. We invented increasingly baroque ways to move—spinning classes that go nowhere, treadmills that simulate walking while staying still. We turned the body into a project to be optimized, measured, perfected.

Now, in the 21st century, we’re fragmenting further: HIIT, CrossFit, yoga, Pilates, biohacking, wearables tracking every metric. Exercise has become both more scientific and more chaotic—we know more about physiology than ever, yet we’re more confused about how to simply move well.

Benefits for Body and Mind

The evidence is clear: exercise benefits both. Physically—cardiovascular health, muscle strength, metabolic function, longevity. Mentally—reduced anxiety and depression, improved cognitive function, better sleep, stress regulation.

But here’s what’s often missed: the mind-body benefits depend on the quality of the relationship you have with the exercise.

If you’re running from self-hatred, exercise becomes punishment. Your body might get stronger, but your mind learns that it must be disciplined into submission. That’s not health; that’s war.

If you’re exercising from genuine care—because you want to feel good, move well, stay capable—both body and mind benefit. The body gets stronger and you develop a friendship with it rather than a dictatorship.

When Exercise Becomes a Burden

Exercise becomes burden when:

It shifts from practice to performance. When every workout must be logged, optimized, shared. When rest feels like failure. When you’re no longer moving for its own sake but to prove something—to yourself, to others, to the algorithm.

It becomes mandatory rather than chosen. When you “have to” exercise rather than “get to.” When missing a day fills you with guilt rather than just being a day you didn’t move much.

It’s solving for the wrong problem. If you’re exercising to fix body image issues rooted in trauma or cultural messaging, no amount of exercise will fix what’s actually broken. The body gets fitter; the mind stays wounded.

It’s excessive. Overtraining, injury from pushing too hard, the athlete who can’t stop even when the body is screaming for rest. This is exercise as addiction, as control, as the only thing that makes you feel okay. That’s not health; that’s dependency.

The Overhyped

Everything gets overhyped eventually.

Right now? Probably HIIT (High-Intensity Interval Training). It’s effective, yes—metabolically efficient, time-saving. But it’s sold as the solution to everything, and the relentless intensity can be unsustainable for many people. Not everyone needs to be at maximum heart rate to be healthy.

CrossFit was overhyped for a while—the “best” workout, the community, the intensity. But the injury rates and cultish devotion revealed the limits. Great for some; damaging for others.

Hot yoga claims benefits beyond regular yoga, but much of the “detoxification” is just sweating, and the heat can be dangerous for some people.

Marathons and ultra-endurance events—there’s a romanticization of extreme endurance as inherently virtuous. But punishing your body for hours isn’t automatically healthier than moderate, consistent movement.

The overhype usually comes when we take something effective for some people in some contexts and declare it the universal solution.

What’s Scientifically Best?

There’s no single “best” because bodies and minds are different, but the science consistently points to:

1. Strength training (2-3x/week)

• Builds muscle mass, bone density, metabolic health
• Proven benefits for mental health, cognitive function, aging
• Doesn’t require gym—bodyweight, resistance bands work

2. Cardiovascular activity (150 min/week moderate, or 75 min vigorous)

• Walking, jogging, cycling, swimming
• Heart health, mood regulation, longevity
• Doesn’t need to be intense—brisk walking counts

3. Flexibility/mobility work

• Yoga, stretching, tai chi
• Prevents injury, maintains range of motion
• Often most neglected but crucial for aging well

4. Balance and coordination

• Becomes critical as we age
• Prevents falls, maintains independence
• Can be integrated into other activities

The real winner? Whatever you’ll actually do consistently.

A perfect program you hate is worthless. A “suboptimal” program you enjoy and maintain for decades is gold.

The Philosophical Truth

The best exercise is the one that helps you inhabit your body rather than control it.

It’s movement that makes you feel alive rather than accomplished. That leaves you energized rather than depleted. That you look forward to rather than dread.

For mind-body balance specifically, the evidence suggests mind-body practices—yoga, tai chi, qigong—excel because they explicitly integrate both. But honestly? Any exercise done with presence, attention, and care for your body’s signals achieves mind-body integration.

The burden of modern exercise culture is that we’ve made it so complicated. Your body wants to move. It’s designed for it. The question isn’t what’s “best”—it’s what helps you remember that movement can be joyful, that your body isn’t a problem to solve but an animal that wants to run, dance, play, explore.

Start there. Everything else is details.