Taking photos of flowers: activity; Walking around to do it: might be exercise

I’m a bit of a word nerd.  I majored in English, so it comes with the territory.  (For reference, my lovely friends and acquaintances who speak linguistics qualify as the real word nerds, in the best possible sense of that term.)  My nerdiness makes me think about the distinctions between words like exercise and activity.

One difference between the two is the point of what is going on.  Exercise, by nature, implies that we are doing whatever it is we are doing to get sweatier, stronger, faster, or healthier in some sense.  Activity can include exercise, but generally the goal is something different.  Take, for example, gardening.  Hefting bags of soil and digging up weeds can certainly make us stronger and get our heart rate up and cause sweat to pour from our working brows, but the point is vegetables or flowers or placating the neighbors who are tired of looking at our wasteland of a yard.

I am all in favor of both activity and exercise, but I need to warn about the danger of confusing the two.  Sometimes we trick ourselves into thinking we have exercised when we have just been doing an activity.  We say, “I gardened, so I don’t have to lift weights” on days when the gardening amounted to deadheading a few rosebushes while knocking back a cooling beverage.

If we have a fitness tracker, it can help keep us honest about what is really exercise.  They count the minutes that we reach our target heart rates and log the number of steps we really took while raking up the debris and hauling it to the green bin.  Sweat is another good indicator for those of us who don’t go in for trackers, unless it is particularly hot out and we would be sweating anyway.  It’s also useful to notice whether we need to stop and rest; if we do, we are probably getting some exercise.

As always, the goal is to maximize our enjoyment of life.  Having a body that does enough exercise to make activity easy and enjoyable helps.