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Writer's pictureFranco Cavaleri, BSc, Ph.Dc
Sep 12, 20103 min read

Exercise essential elixir for physical and mental health

Updated: Oct 16, 2023


Original post: September 13, 2010



Exercise essential elixir for physical and mental health

Dogs need their daily exercise and, rain or shine, they must go for their walk to relieve themselves and stimulate their senses.

This routine will bring you off the couch and out for a daily walk on those days when motivation may be a bit hard to muster and the weather just isn’t working with you. Who needs a personal trainer when you have a dog? And it’s great to have everyone in the family commit to a daily walk together, supporting the physical and emotional health of the entire family. Training with your canine partner can lead to variety in your fitness program to include variable pace and variable terrain training. Hills and interval training are perfect fitness strategies.

However, your canine training partner will need some attention to nutritional detail if he’s expected to persist in this role and maintain life quality. It’s no different from the performance nutrition you need to fuel activity and recover from the work. However, your canine’s unique metabolism and digestive system uses and absorbs nutrients a little differently than you do. In addition, some of the nutrients that are essential to you are not essential to your canine. The proportions, combinations and the molecular type fido needs to achieve maximum fitness are different.

Although our bodies and those of our companion animals are equipped with genetically built in maintenance systems that are supposed to keep tissues and biological systems in tip top shape, we know they eventually begin to falter and even fail. Nutrition is the most common limiting factor but nutrition is most often the easiest thing to fix. Preventive maintenance plays a huge role in long term health and life quality. We have more control over this personal maintenance than we think and we must take a proactive role to make certain it occurs without interruption.

This is especially important if regular exercise is part of the lifestyle program. As much as exercise is an elixir for good health, the extra physical work induces greater wear and tear and creates unique nutritional needs. If not met, the extra physical work can backfire to set the stage for disease.

Research shows with irrefutable evidence that active lifestyle plays a monumental role in health. Studies demonstrate that canine companion owners tend to be fitter and healthier than non-pet owners and it’s no coincidence. Canine guardians simply engage in more physical activity in order to support their pets’ innate needs and this automatically translates into better health for the human. Your pet can be a formidable training partner that keeps you on track. Maintaining the muscle mass with regular resistance training and conditioning the cardiovascular system with a brisk walk or light run supports longevity and quality of life. But longevity and life quality still ultimately depend on nutrition.

Physical exercise wedded to poor nutrition is a recipe for disaster. A working body requires more quality nutrition to maintain worn tissues and keep up the faster paced metabolic activity. Antioxidant intake, including vitamins and minerals, must be increased to counter the oxidation that physical exercise causes. Our commonly accepted pet foods, however, are overprocessed and overexposed to heat, light and oxygen. The result is damaged nutrition that cannot be utilized efficiently for recovery from exercise. The consequence is premature tissue degeneration that`s significantly noticeable in the joints. Add exercise to this limitation and the degeneration is even further accelerated.

Your dog’s supplement must be formulated specifically for his metabolic and digestive uniqueness. It must be supplied daily in supplemental form as an addition to regular feed to make certain these nutrients are fresh an active; to ensure they have not been scathed by processing. This supports the metabolism and the maintenance systems it drives every day despite the oxidative load of the body. It allows your canine training partner to stick with the lifestyle program that will keep you both in peak physical and mental health well into those senior years.

Exercise is the elixir of life but we have to maintain the body in order to be able to perform this physical and mental elixir life-long. Exercise coupled to healthy diet, supplemented by whole live nutrients is the key to longevity and life quality for you and your canine companion.


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