One benefit of aerobic exercise is that it detoxifies the body. Aerobic exercise promotes sweating and sweating encourages toxins to leave the body through the skin. Most people don’t know it, but the body is supposed to be eliminating two pounds of toxins each day, just through the skin. Aerobic exercise is a key factor in making this happen, and it’s also critical that the skin can “breathe” freely to release toxins, which can be accomplished by doing skin brushing.

Skin brushing is a simple technique where the skin all over the body is brushed daily, in the direction of the heart, to remove any dead skin so the skin can breathe freely. Skin brushing compounds the detoxification benefits of aerobic exercise by ensuring the toxins that can leave the body through sweating, actually leave the body.

In addition to helping the body remove toxins through sweating, aerobic exercise also stimulates the lymphatic system, which is a key detoxification pathway. The lymph is similar to blood; it brings nutrients to our cells and importantly, it removes waste from our cells. However, unlike other the blood which has the heart as a pump, the lymphatic system requires movement and exercise, particularly aerobic exercise, to function properly. The movement of aerobic exercise moves our lymph and keeps it from becoming stagnant and collecting waste. It also encourages the removal of waste from our cells. Just like water easily becomes polluted when stagnant, so also does our lymph.

Old lymph, and its accumulated waste from the cells, is deposited in the colon for removal from the body. Therefore, to get the most detoxification from aerobic exercise, you can also do colon cleansing to ensure that old toxic lymph and cellular waste leaves your body. Since many problems in the body are initially caused by a dirty colon, colon cleansing can also be an important detoxification step – one that can be just as important as regularly exercising aerobically.