What REALLY Happens When You Start EXERCISING Every Day For 30 Days

"Hello, Health Champions. What if there was a  magic pill that could help you become a better  

and happier you? What if this magic pill could  give you your ideal body, give you more energy,  

less disease, a better mood, better sleep, and  even give you more confidence and help you live  

longer—but not just live longer, but live longer  with high quality of life? How much would you be  

willing to pay for such a pill? My bet is that  that would be the number one selling product in  

the world. They would sell trillions and trillions  of dollars of that product. Of course, there is no  

such pill, and there never will be. There can't be  because that's not how the body works. But there  

is something even better, and that thing is called  exercise, and that's what we're going to talk  

about. We really want to understand what exercise  does to the body. But even though exercise can  

transform your life in so many ways, less than 25%  of people exercise on a regular basis, and out of  

those people, the vast majority don't really know  why they're exercising. And by that, I mean they  

don't fully understand how critical movement is to  the functioning of the body. The number one reason  

people exercise is for looks, and there are two  things people want to change: they want to lose  

weight and/or they want to build more muscle. Now,  the funny thing is that even though the number one  

reason for exercise is weight loss, it doesn't  really work all that well for weight loss. It  

can help a little bit; it can assist you in your  efforts, but it's not the key factor in weight  

loss. Lowering insulin and changing your diet and  eating more whole foods is the key factor. And  

of course, exercise and weightlifting work for  bodybuilding if you do enough of it. And then,  

of course, marketing comes along and reinforces  this shallow understanding that it's all about  

weight loss, and they say that if you buy this  product or this cream or this pill, then you don't  

even have to exercise, as if that was a goal—to  be able to lose weight without exercise, as if  

exercise wasn't a goal in itself, with all the  benefits that it can give you. And I've even heard  

people say, 'Well, why do you exercise? You're  already thin.' So, we want to start understanding  

why exercise is a goal in itself, not because it  can provide some way of changing how you look.  

It's about how the body functions. So, the first  thing we need to understand is the purpose of the  

brain is to create and manage movement. In fact,  there was a Nobel Prize winner called Rod Sperry.  

He got a Nobel Prize for brain research, and he  said that more than 90% of the energy expenditure  

of the brain is used in relating the physical  body in a field of gravity. In other words,  

as you move your body around in the physical world  and have gravity working on you, acting on you at  

the same time, that is a very complex action  that uses up the vast majority of the brain's  

resources. And to help illustrate that, one of  my favorite examples is a little creature called  

the sea squirt that looks something like this.  It starts out its life looking like a tadpole  

(that's this little thing that's going to become  a frog). It has one eye and one fin so that it can  

detect its environment and move around. It has an  extremely simple nervous system, comprising about  

215 neurons or brain cells, and they're arranged  in a way that's similar to a notochord, which  

is in the human embryo when we are just after  conception, when our nervous system just starts  

forming. We have a notochord that is basically the  precursor to the spine, and this looks remarkably  

similar in all creatures, from the sea squirt  to the tadpole to humans to basically any other  

vertebrate—anything that's going to have a spine  eventually looks very, very similar at this stage.  

Now, the difference is, in the creatures that are  supposed to have a spine, this little notochord  

continues to develop into a full-blown nervous  system with a spine and a spinal cord. But the  

sea squirt is an interesting creature in that its  destiny is not to move around; it only gets this  

nervous system temporarily. So, its job is to find  a place to live, just like a tree or a rose bush,  

and once it finds that place, now it doesn't  need to move; it doesn't need a nervous system  

to detect its environment and be able to move  around. So, as a result, it consumes its brain,  

and when it's done with that, it has zero brain  cells. So, let's compare a few different creatures  

and try to get a little more grasp on this idea.  So, a tree, for example, has zero brain cells and  

zero synapses because it doesn't need to move  around to survive; it gets its nutrition right  

where it's standing. But anything that needs  to move around to find its food needs to have  

a nervous system. So, there is something called a  ringworm. It's a very primitive, simple creature,  

about 1 millimeter long, and it's popular to  do research on because scientists can learn a  

whole lot about development and neurons that way.  This little worm, pretty much like the sea squirt,  

has a few hundred—it has 300—brain cells, but then  it has 7,000 synapses. Synapses are where neurons  

connect; it's where brain cells hook up with each  other, so they have strings or wires so they can  

signal and talk to each other. The way that we  learn things is we connect different neurons to  

each other, and we develop different patterns,  and then later on, we can learn new things by  

creating new patterns. Another little creature  most people are probably familiar with is called  

a fruit fly. It has around 3,000 brain cells  and about a half a million synapses. So then,  

we take a mega leap up to the human brain, which  has around 100 billion brain cells, and each  

human brain cell makes, on average, 5 to 10,000  connections. So the possibilities are pretty much  

endless; we can configure these connections  almost infinitely. But at any given time,  

a human would have somewhere around 1,000 trillion  synapses, which is about 10 to the 15th power.

So I've used the sea squirt a few times before  as an example, and in some of those videos,  

I've said things that don't move don't have a  brain, and I want to qualify that a little bit  

and say that things that are not intended to move  don't need to have a brain. But because of the way  

I said it, a lot of people misinterpreted that,  and they believe that a brain is the same thing  

as intelligence. So now, I got about a hundred  harsh comments from different viewers saying  

things like, "Well, what about Stephen Hawking?"  or "Stephen Hawking would disagree," or "Are you  

saying that Stephen Hawking doesn't have a brain?"  And someone suggested that "Stephen Hawking is  

smarter than you will ever be." And I'm not going  to disagree with that in the slightest because  

Stephen Hawking had a very unusual, supreme,  unique intellect, and there are theories that this  

unique intellect helped him survive the longest  that anyone has ever had Lou Gehrig's disease,  

or ALS, also known as amyotrophic lateral  sclerosis. So again, the name isn't important,  

but what's important is that the average  lifespan after diagnosis is about five years,  

and Stephen Hawking survived for 55 years. So  obviously, for humans who are designed to move,  

for humans who are designed to go and develop and  build things and find food and develop tools to  

get better at finding food, we need to have a  brain. And if we then lose the ability to move,  

does that mean that we don't need a brain  anymore? But what we can say is that because  

Stephen Hawking wasn't able to move, he gradually  deteriorated more and more over the years. And  

we can also safely say that he had some severe  challenges in expressing his life and his health.  

But the biggest reason people reacted so harshly  is that, as a culture, we believe that the brain  

is the same thing as intelligence, the same thing  as IQ, and if we say that something doesn't have  

a brain, we're calling that thing stupid, which  is not the case at all. So we need to understand  

what it means to have a strong brain and a brain  that can handle everything that it's supposed to.  

And the thing that we call intelligence, the thing  that we call focused thought, conscious thought,  

is about 1 millionth of what the brain actually  does. It processes somewhere on the order of a  

billion bits of information every second, and then  our consciousness takes little snapshots of that,  

of about a thousand bits per second. So I'm  not saying that our intelligence resides in one  

millionth of the brain, but I'm saying that the  conscious part that guides our intelligence is a  

millionth of our brain. We still need the whole  brain to create all these pathways that we can  

learn things, but the conscious portion is about  one millionth. And what does the brain really  

do? It manages everything about you. The brain  provides you strength and muscle tone because,  

without the brain signal feeding the muscle, it's  about as strong or has about the muscle tone of a  

steak. Your ability to have coordination  and balance is the result of the brain's  

orchestration of millions and millions of signals  down to the millisecond to time things very, very  

precisely. The brain also, of course, regulates  everything you don't have to think about, such  

as blood flow and heart rate and breath rate, but  it goes even further than that because a strong,  

balanced brain has the ability to turn things  on and turn things off, to enable a good mood  

and attitude. Your ability to handle stress  depends on the brain's ability to turn off  

emergency signals when there is no emergency  anymore and to put things into a proper context.  

And we can go as far as to say that your overall  ability to enjoy life, your ability to be happy,  

your capacity to perceive life depends on how  strong, developed, and balanced your brain is.

So in a nutshell, we can say that the brain's  purpose is its ability to process signals, to  

receive signals, to process signals, and respond  to signals. And remember, like we said, that 90%  

of the brain's activity, 90% of those signals that  the brain processes, have to do with movement.

Here's how we want to think about this: We have  the brain that receives signals first from the  

body, and then the body—the brain sends signals  back to the body. So the brain would never know  

what to do with the body unless the body sent  massive amounts of information. So if you can  

touch your nose, it's because the brain is  receiving information about where this finger  

is relative to the nose. That's hundreds of  millions of bits of information. And then the  

brain can take that information and relate it to  the changes and figure out exactly where that nose  

is and what the timing and speed and impact and  so forth, so you don't slap yourself in the face.

So the signals from the body provide the brain  with a picture. It's kind of like a digital  

monitor, like your computer monitor or your TV.  It has millions and millions of little pixels,  

and together, all these pixels form an  image that you can perceive. If there are  

fewer pixels, then the image gets blotchy  or pixelated. So if the body doesn't send  

a correct picture to the brain, then the  brain doesn't understand where the body  

is in relation to its environment. That's  called proprioception, or body awareness.

But the more you move, the more you're  providing information to the brain,  

the more you're strengthening the brain. So  the purpose of a muscle is to perform work.  

So if you go to the gym and you pump some  iron, you're putting a load on the muscle;  

you're fulfilling the purpose of that muscle,  and the muscle will grow. If you do the opposite,  

if you hurt your arm, you put it in a cast, now  there are very few signals, you're not putting  

any load on the muscle, so the muscle shrinks, but  there's also very few signals because there's no  

movement. So now the brain starts understanding  that arm, that body part, less and less.

That is how there's a continuous exchange  of signals between the brain and the body,  

and the absolute best way to fulfill, to keep up  that signal flow, is exercise. And those signals,  

the 90% of all the signals the brain receives  through exercise, is the juice that keeps the  

brain alive, that keeps that brain strong  and functional and healthy. And through all  

the mechanisms we talked about here, exercise  also drives something called neuroplasticity,  

which means the brain's and the nervous system's  and the individual neurons' ability to change,  

to create different connections. And this  is how we learn things, by creating more  

synapses and new synapses. Information flows  differently, and we can adapt to our environment,  

and we can learn new things, whether it's  learning to walk or learning to drive a  

car or learning sign language or learning  another language or learning specific skills,  

whatever they may be. And there's no way to  learn anything new without rewiring your brain,  

without creating new synapses,  and this is called synaptogenesis,  

meaning we can make new connections that involve  different information, different learning.

But then, in order for us to create these  connections, they don't happen by themselves.  

They are fueled by different hormones, and  there are two in particular: one's called BDNF,  

brain-derived neurotrophic factor, and the other  is called human growth hormone. And together,  

these act like Miracle-Gro for these brain  synapses, in that without them, you can't make  

any synapses. So the number one driver, the most  powerful way to make more BDNF and more growth  

hormone, is fasting and exercise because both  fasting and exercise are a challenge to the body.  

When we fast, when we exercise, it's related  to us moving into the world and finding more  

food. When we're fasting, it's more important than  ever that we keep our body functioning optimally,  

that we're really sharp so that we can function  and go find that food. And the more challenging  

the exercise is, the more the body is responding  with these hormones, the higher the incentive for  

the body to adapt and change and become better. So  the higher the intensity, meaning high-intensity  

interval training, for example, then you're making  massive amounts of human growth hormone and BDNF.

And I just recently learned something  fascinating about BDNF. It stands for  

brain-derived neurotrophic factor, so it  means it mostly comes from the brain or  

that's where all of it came from, we thought,  until I learned recently that muscles can also  

make BDNF. And here, I just went wow;  it's so beautiful because the muscles  

and the brain are so tightly connected in the  relationship that we just talked about. So,  

if the brain makes BDNF and needs BDNF, and  then the muscles also assist in making BDNF  

when you exercise, then the signals from  the muscles—the muscles are contributing;  

they're supporting the brain in making new  synapses and adapting and learning things better.

So, if you take the challenge to exercise every  day for 30 days, here are just a few of the things  

that you could expect: increased angiogenesis  in the brain—what does that mean? It means you  

develop more blood vessels; you increase and  grow the number of physical blood vessels in  

the brain so that you can circulate more blood  and support that brain at a higher level. You  

would improve your proprioception, or your body  awareness, because just like we talked about,  

whenever you move, you're teaching your brain  something about the body, but you're also making  

the brain stronger and more capable at the  same time. You would lengthen your telomeres,  

and telomeres are the little end caps of  your DNA strand, and when they're longer,  

that makes you live longer. You can expect to  improve your cholesterol health, and with that,  

I don't mean that you're going to lower  your total number of cholesterol. I mean,  

most likely, you're going to increase the ratio  between HDL and LDL. It's very likely your HDL  

will go up a little bit, and your LDL will  go down a little bit. But more importantly,  

even if both of them went up, you're going to  change—probably the size of your LDL particles  

would increase to become more healthy LDL  cholesterol. You would probably improve  

your microbiome health and balance—the balance  of all your 40 trillion bacteria in your gut.  

You would improve the number and the variety of  healthy bacteria, and you would reduce the number  

of pathogenic and inflammatory bacteria, and in  doing that, you would also affect and improve your  

immune function. And you can expect to improve  your overall mental and physical well-being.

So, if you catch what I'm saying, I  am basically saying that everything  

is likely to get better at some level because  exercise affects virtually every physiological  

pathway and mechanism in some way, and it  is impossible to express optimal health,  

optimal physiology without movement. It  doesn't mean that you can't have a good,  

long life, but it wouldn't be  as good as it could have been.

If you enjoyed this video, you're going to  love that one. And if you truly want to master  

health by understanding how the body really  works, make sure you subscribe, hit that bell,  

and turn on all the notifications so  you never miss a life-saving video."