Generally, physical activity improves health and lowers the risk of chronic diseases such as type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular diseases, and cancers. Exercise has both immediate benefits and those you experience in the long run. Regular exercise allows you to tap into these long-term benefits and improves your overall well-being.
There is so much data that supports regular exercise that it is almost a crime not to practice it. In this article, we will try to convince you on just a few of the reasons why you need to make a habit out of exercise.
Reduces Body Fat
This is one of the main reasons people turn to exercise. Although weight loss is highly dependent on nutrition, exercise can help speed up this process and maintain an ideal weight. Your Body Mass Index (BMI) is a measure of your approximate overall metabolic state. To calculate this, you can visit the Center for Disease Control website.
People could fall into 4 categories, underweight, normal weight, overweight, and obese. Being within the overweight or obese categories is highly detrimental to your health. They are related to a higher risk of type 2 DM and cardiovascular disease. Obesity can be bad for self-image and cause difficulty in performing daily activities. Aerobic exercises can help push this figure down.
The more exercise you do, the more your body wires itself to burn calories, and your basal metabolic rate rises. Adding resistance exercises to your daily routine is also great for weight loss. This is because they increase your lean body mass which is proportional to average caloric expenditure.
Build Aerobic Power
Your body’s ability to work at its maximum capacity through the use of oxygen to burn energy in its tissues is called aerobic capacity. Usually people lose 1 percent of their aerobic capacity each year. That adds up to 10% in a decade. Calculate from age 40 and you would find that the person would have lost 30% of what she had at 40 years when she is 70.
Short-term and long-term studies on exercise show that you can reduce this figure by half. Meaning in a 30 year period, you would lose only 15% of this capacity. Sparing yourself of needless huffing and puffing due to a suboptimal aerobic capacity. Many other benefits of exercise are secondary to this. So if nothing else speaks to you in this article, let this.
Boost Immune System
The immune system is what protects you from all kinds of damage. It is involved in protecting you from viruses, bacteria, free radicals, and all sorts of toxic material. It also helps in maintaining a healthy response to stress. Scientists talk about immune senescence which accompanies aging. These studies were carried out on people who do not regularly exercise.
Though it seems like a natural process that nothing can be done to halt at the moment, even short-term exercise schedules reduce the effects of aging on this system. Extending its lifespan is one of the surest ways of extending yours.
Improves Mental Health
Life can be such a drab no matter what is in the external environment, as long as your internal environment is poor. Regular exercise improves your mood and lowers the risk of depression. We have a culture of medicating everything when a simple behavioral change could produce a much more natural, safe, and sustainable result.
When you work out, feel-good hormones known as endorphins are released in the brain. These can lower anxiety and reduce habitual negative thought patterns. You can get bright perspectives about things that had seemed so gloomy with your energy levels heightened with regular exercise.
Increases Physical Strength
Resistance training increases your muscle bulk. It also increases muscle tone which means that contractions of muscle when you are doing work is more efficient. If you refuse to work on your muscles through weight-lifting, as you age, you lose about 1 percent a year. This process is called “sarcopenia” and the most effective way of combating it is through resistance training,
Another age-related change that can weaken us is the loss of bone density. It reduces by 1 percent too. Lifting weights is also the way to go in slowing this process down.
