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Push-ups are some of the easiest exercises for most people to do, and one doctor reveals why doing 30 every single day can actually have a transformative effect on your health, and can positively impact your body in the long-term.
While you might not be able to do too many right now, integrating something as simple as push-ups into your daily routine will almost definitely improve your health and even help you live longer — no matter how old you are when you start.
Dr Alex Wibberley – known on YouTube as 'Doctor Alex' – shares lots of life-changing health advice using scientific evidence to explain why its good for your body, and one of his newest videos centers push-ups as a form of exercise that benefits your wellbeing massively.
Foundational to this is how our bodies have remained the same yet the way we use them has changed massively over decades and centuries.
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Our bodies are designed and built for physical activity, and are optimized so that we have the ability to lift things every single day as that was once a necessity for survival.
Instead, most people nowadays live relatively sedentary lives where you're rarely, if ever in some extreme cases, activating essential muscles through movement or physical activity — and it's a good idea to change that.
Some people get this through their jobs, yet for others integrating a form of exercise like push-ups can make a world of a difference despite the amount that you need to actually do being, in the words of Doctor Alex, 'laughably small'.
First, and arguably most importantly for a long and healthy life, is that push-ups help build muscles that let you remain independent later on in life, as the exercise activates a 'switch' for muscle building known as mechanistic target of rapamycin (mTOR for short).
Not only does regular exercise turn on this protein – which regrows muscle fibers in a stronger and bigger way than before – but it also allows your nervous system to get better at activating mTOR, allowing your strength levels to grow at an even faster rate.
Your heart also significantly improves after you complete push-ups, as they force the vital organ to beat faster and more forcefully, which allows it to adapt and become more efficient over time.
Doctor Alex also outlines how something as simple as push-ups can lessen the risk of chronically high blood sugar and insulin resistance, which are common issues that crop up in older individuals.
These issues can impact your blood vessels, kidneys, eyes, and even the nerves in your hands and feet, so doing something that's as simple as a push-up seems like a no brainer compared to the issues that it mitigates down the line.
