Let’s Get Physical

The UK has an aging population and figures show that activity levels decrease with age.  Fewer people are taking exercise by the time they reach their mid 50’s, so why should we keep fit?

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It’s a generally recognised fact that having someone to train with helps us keep to a training routine. Perhaps it’s their encouragement, perhaps its because they bully us a bit, or perhaps, just as Lucifer observes in Paradise Lost, “it’s a comfort in Hell to have companions in suffering.”

Whatever the case, the presence of other people who want to train with you and with whom you also want to train with actually helps the vast majoirty of people to get fit, and more importantly, to enjoy doing so.

So here I want to extol the virtues of doing active and sporty things for charity as a good way of getting your momentum going to change your life for the healthier. Think about it, not only can you arrange to do some sort of charity event with a group of friends, or perhaps work colleagues, and so you have the encouragement of having others around you doing the same thing and expecting you to turn up to training, but you also have a fixed goal - the charity event itself - to focus on, so your training doesn’t just seems like an endless and pointless process.

You could organise your own event, like a charity row-boat race or fun-run, or you could organise for you and your companions to take part in a pre-existing sporting event, like the London marathon say. But you don’t just have to go for more obviously sporting events, anything physically active is a consideration. Just recently a friend of mine performed in a charity dance expo for which she’d trained regularly for weeks along with her girlfriends. She not only got a lot fitter but also made new friends and had a real sense of achievement at the end after the expo.

In fact quite a few poeple I know have continued with the sport or activity they began for a charity event long after the event had passed, simply because the habit of training for it and the enjoyment they ultimately got from it stayed with them - which is an entirely good thing as far as I’m concerned.

Why not give it a try? You’ll not only get fitter and probably have a good time, but at the end of the day you can also wallow in a sense of moral self-satisfaction that however well you performed on the day, you did it for charity…