Why you should not be running?

If you are a competitive distance runner or a cyclist who's serious about your sport,

this article has not been written for you.

This highly informative discussion is intended for those people who have taken seriously the advice of their doctors, physical therapists,

exercise physiologists, and the popular media's dutiful reporting on these sources of common

misinformation about what kind of physical activity is best for your long-term health and

continued ability to participate in the business of living well.

Endurance exercise is the most common recommended form of activity for health and wellness.

Every time you see an exercise recommendation denominated in minutes,

you are seeing a recommendation for long, slow distance exercise, LSD, we call it, or cardio in the modern vernacular, running, bicycling, rowing,

or their health club analogs on machines at the gym, or what they mean when they say exercise.

Bidding on who you listen to, 20 minutes per day,

three hours, 120 minutes per week,

or any permutation thereof is a prescription

for fitness, health, wellness,

is the standard in both the fitness

and health care industries, and getting stronger is always of secondary importance.

Well, the endurance exercise approach ignores several very basic facts.

First, strength is the ability to produce force with your muscles against an external resistance, like those with which we interact in our environment as we go through

our days, living our lives productively, and endurance exercise is directly antagonistic to strength because an endurance

adaptation occurs at the expense of strength. The body's basic response to a stress of any type

is to recover from that stress in a way that makes it less likely to be a stress

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