I came across a fascinating post on NYTimes.com the other day (“Exercise as Potent Medicine”, NYTimes Blog Post) . It was really buried on the website but the title caught my eye – “Exercise as Potent Medicine”. The quick summary is that a recently published study compared –

i) how well various drugs succeeded in reducing deaths among people who were diagnosed with several common and serious conditions (such as heart disease and diabetes), versus –

ii) people who didn’t take drugs and just exercised.

The outcome of the study was that the results consistently showed that drugs and exercise produced almost EXACTLY the same results. As with most medical studies, this emphasized the need for further study and larger sample sets but even on a small scale, but the finding is pretty powerful.

We at Crossfit Thermal have been preaching the benefits of exercise as being a life changing process. Every day we get to help people gain strength, increase their lung capacity and even fit into that pair of smaller jeans. One of the other, less obvious benefits is that exercise is a powerful tool in maintaining a level of health that can remove the need for certain medications or even getting people off of existing medications. Don’t get me wrong, there are clearly situations where medications have a material and proven benefit. What we provide here is an option or supplement that your doctors should be prescribing as frequently as they prescribe statins.

In today’s world when we are faced with a health problem, like high blood pressure or high cholesterol, it’s really easy to just take a pill from our doctor and keep on living life like we always have. Well, sometimes there is an option that will get you the same result as the medicine but will improve your life in countless other ways. Sometimes the easy way isn’t always the best way.