“I feel a lot worse about my life, and the world after working out,” said….nobody ever. No matter what kind of bad mood I’m in- grumpy, tired, sad, angry- if I can manage to haul myself onto an elliptical/stationary bike/treadmill usually after about 20 minutes or so, I start to feel better. My mind starts to wander from whatever was bothering me. I find myself thinking about totally unrelated things, or sometimes out of no where stumbling on a resolution. At the very least, the endorphins kick in and I feel a little better than when I started.

One day I got to thinking after a run, where out of no where the fix to something I had been thinking over popped magically into my head as I jogged. They don’t call it working out for nothing I thought, working out your problems, working your body to get out of your head. I mean, where did the word really come from anyhow?

It’s a fairly new word in the English language, around for only about a hundred years. People speculate that it came after hard labor or things like construction work that use similar motions and body challenging movement. Others speculate that it comes from using the word “out” as totally expended, used until it’s finished. The word implies working your muscles until they’re spent, used up, out of energy. The resolutions to annoying situations that seem to pop out of no where, well they’re just a bonus of giving your mind a chance to do its own thing while you focus on not falling off the treadmill while you change the song on your iPhone, or running that extra half mile along the river without stopping to walk.