As a rule of thumb, exercise can do one of two things: It can help people maintain their current abilities, or it can improve their abilities. This translates into maintaining your current metabolic status or improving it. Taking a leisurely walk around the block helps people maintain their current metabolic status. This is useful. It’s certainly better than losing strength or ability. However, to improve metabolic capacity, people need to push themselves. They must work toward getting faster, stronger, more flexible, doing more reps, or achieving some other metric of increased capacity.
