Humor is Better than Exercise!

Reason #2 God Gave Us Humor: Humor is Better than Exercise!

By Ron Ross

You may have read the meme, “Rabbits jump, and they live eight years. Dogs run, and they live 15 years, turtles do nothing, and they live for 150 years. Lesson learned.”
Or how about this one: “A balanced diet is having a cupcake in each hand.”

OK, one more: “I signed up for an exercise class and was told to wear loose-fitting clothing. If I HAD any loose-fitting clothing, I wouldn’t have signed up in the first place.”

Are you laughing yet? I hope so because laughter is better than exercise.

Your local gym owner will likely tell you that exercise is a great way to cure nearly every disease in life. “Exercise more, and your brain works better, Alzheimer’s disease is abated, and Parkinson’s slowly disappears,” they preach.
The same (well, almost the same) claims are made for laughter.

A few years ago, the New York Times reported about a study done at Oxford University with a large number of graduate and undergraduate men and women. Do you know what they made them do? – they made them laugh.

They found that laughter is part emotion (I’m pretty sure they already knew that), but they also found that laughter is real physical activity – exercise if you please. When you laugh, you forcefully and repeatedly exhale your breath from your lungs which requires effort by the muscles of your diaphragm – that’s exercise, right?

No doubt, you have placed your hand on your stomach and declared, “I laughed until it hurt.” The pain you felt was real, and if you laugh for an extended period, you really will be both tired and sore – the same kind of pain and exhaustion you get from doing a few dozen or a few hundred sit-ups.

There is another way laughter and exercise are similar. Because laughter is an infectious activity, people laugh more when there are others around. I experienced this personally when I participated in a humorous speech contest. When practicing my speech with one or two people, they seldom laughed out loud. When I performed it before 300 people packed into a room, the laughter was exponentially more robust.

It’s the same when working out. You will work out harder when the gym is full, and every machine is buzzing, than you will if you’re the only one there.

There’s a funny thing circulating on the Internet that shows a Chinese looking gentleman dressed in a white lab coat – the kind you see doctors wear. Someone allegedly asks him, “Doctor, I’ve heard that cardiovascular exercise can prolong life. Is this true?”

His answer: “Heart only good for so many beats, and that it. Don’t waste on exercise. Everything wears out eventually. Speeding up heart not make you live longer; it like saying you extend the life of car by driving faster. Want to live longer? Take a nap.”

It’s apparently a spoof because exercise is good for the body and the soul, but so is laughter, and for that matter, so is a nap.

Bonus: Someone said, “The best exercise is jumping for joy!”

©2019 Dr. Ronald D. S. Ross