Exercise is many things for many people, and that’s the way it should be. But it should also be something else for every one of us: an absolute wonderment.

Something that, when you reflect upon it, produces awe and respect.

If you think I’m giving far too much weight to the act of lifting of it, consider what an especially knowledgeable one of us, cardiologist Euan Ashley, professor of cardiovascular medicine at Stanford University and the chair of its Department of Medicine, says about exercise on the January 1 PBS broadcast of “News Hour.”

That it’s the “most powerful” medical option known to man.

It seems, however, most of us don’t share his view. For proof of the pudding is indeed in the eating, and three out of every four American adults, according to CDC guidelines, don’t ingest enough of this, sometimes sweet, sometimes bittersweet dessert.

So what could get more people to chow down? What should get you to feel — if you don’t already — absolute wonderment about breaking a sweat?

What News Hour-interviewer William Brangham also calls Ashley’s recent efforts: a “much deeper dive” into exercise.

Take it and it’s sure to keep you from being or becoming part of the 75 percent who drop the ball instead of work out with it. And to start your submersion, let it be said that Ashley and the groups working with him have not yet finished all their research, but that he felt confident enough to share a few of their most surprising early findings in the interview.

One of these occurred after researchers had formerly sedentary laboratory rats run on treadmills for eight weeks, took tissue samples from them, and then compared those to ones taken before the rats became exercisers. “The thing we were really surprised to find,” he tells Brangham, is that the rats had turned into “almost different beings.”

Every single tissue sample taken after exercise was “completely different than before,” and these changes took the rats’ health “in a very positive direction.”

One of these very positive changes occurred in the rats’ mitochondria, the powerhouse of their cells, and humans’ cells as well, for it produces adenosine triphosphate (ATP), the energy source both use in muscle-fiber contractions. This particular change was so dramatic, Ashely explains, that the images of the rats’ mitochondria after exercise look like “mirror-image” opposites to ones that are diseased.

Ashley offers a theory about how exercise engenders this difference. It stresses the body in a helpful way, one which “prepares our bodies to deal with the stress of everyday life.”

It does this so well, in fact, that Ashley regularly tells his patients “one minute of exercise buys you five minutes of extra life,” which is why he also tells those feeling time-crunched “you definitely have time for exercise.”

He mentions that one benefit of exercise became apparent more than 70 years ago. Based on research done on approximately 31,000 London bus drivers and conductors during a three-year study, it was discovered that bus drivers, who are seated and sedentary, were 70 percent more likely to develop coronary heart disease than conductors, who are upright and moving about.

Moreover, the conductors who did develop CHD were not stricken with it as severely, leading to “a smaller early case-fatality and a lower early mortality-rate.”

The PBS interview was less than eight minutes, so Ashley doesn’t cite the study in quite the detail as provided above, nor does he reference a self-reported study on leisure-time physical activity published in the August 2022 issue of Circulation that supports the London Transport Workers Study.

The self-reporting was done by more than 115,000 adults by filling out the same questionnaire 15 times over 30 years. It clearly shows while any exercise is good, doing more than the recommended minimum is better.

The minimum is what the Physical Activity Guidelines Advisory Committee has suggested since 2018: at least 150 to 300 minutes per week of moderate exercise or 75 to 150 minutes per week of vigorous exercise or an equivalent combination of both. The study found that the participants who did two to four times more than the suggested amount of moderate exercise had a 28 to 38 percent lower risk of dying from cardiovascular disease, as well as 26 to 31 percent lower risk of dying from any disease.

Those who did two to four times more than the suggested amount of vigorous exercise benefitted almost as much. While you might find that a bit disheartening (pardon the pun), it helps dispel the notion that going to exercise extremes — running marathons, doing triathlons — causes heart problems.

If you read this column with any regularity, you know I go absolutely gaga about exercise almost as often as I resort to metaphor. Allow me to indulge in both to end.

If exercise were not an action but a person, he’d be Time magazine’s Man of the Year in whatever year Ashely and the groups working with him publish their research.