Dr. Robert Whitfield explains why excessive exercise backfires: the body adapts like it does to drugs, leading to joint pain, hormonal dysfunction, and low energy. Exercise needs the right dose, intensity, and recovery, or your body enters a protective mode that actually conserves energy.
we need to burn off what we ate, or we need to earn our food, or, oh, I had dessert and a glass of wine at dinner last night, so I need to like go extra hard today to burn that off. And not only is this actually not very effective because your body adapts when you give it, just like medicine, you wanna give your body the right medicine, the right drug in the right amounts to limit side effects and to maximize its potential outcome. The same goes with exercise. We wanna give our bodies the right amount of exercise in the right doses with the right amounts of recovery. And that's how we see the best outcomes. When that scale is tipped, when we give our body too much exercise stress stimulus, we see symptoms like joint pain, hormonal dysfunction, reproductive issues, um, all low energy, anxiety, all sorts of things. So your body, when it senses an energy deficit in the way of lots of exercise and potentially underfueling, goes into savior mode of let's reserve as much energy as possible. And so things in your body stop functioning the way they should.
