6 Great Reasons Why We Need to Exercise
I had never thought of sharing on "why exercise" and always
assumed that we all believed and agreed that it was an
essential part of everyone's lifestyle regardless of
whether one had the time or discipline to do it, until
about two years ago I gradually pulled myself out from a
sedentary lifestyle and I established a workout regimen in
the morning and started to read more about the different
types of workout such as aerobic training, resistance
exercise and weight bearing activities. I reckon that
exercising may be very often emphasized by all, but
sometimes, its benefits may not be so clear and obvious to
everyone.
1. Helps Strengthen Your Heart
Aerobic exercises benefit the circulation of your blood
through your heart and blood vessels, that is, your
cardiovascular system. They make our heart work harder,
pump more blood, and reduce the risk of developing heart
disease. With each beat of your heart, a surge of blood is
pumped into your body's intricate web of blood vessels. The
pressure exerted on your artery walls as blood passes
through helps keep the blood flowing smoothly (what you
know as 'blood pressure'). A build-up of plaques in your
arteries, caused by cholesterol in your bloodstream can
affect your blood flow and cause serious damage to your
cardiovascular system.
A workout on a regular basis benefits your heart because it
helps lower the build-up of plaques in arteries by
increasing the concentration of high-density lipoprotein
(HDL) cholesterol (the "good" cholesterol) and decreasing
the concentration of low-density lipoprotein (LDL)
cholesterol (the "bad" cholesterol) in your blood, while
keeping the blood pressure at the optimal level. As a
result, your heart is able to do a better job in delivering
oxygen to all parts of your body. Blood travels more
efficiently, bringing much-needed oxygen from your lungs
and nutrients to the rest of the body. That's why people
generally feel more refreshed and energetic after
exercising.
Want to consider some aerobic activities? Try swimming,
basketball, rope skipping, jogging (or brisk walking),
in-line skating, soccer, or biking.
2. Maintains Strong Bones and Muscles
I am sure most of us have tried doing push-ups, weight
lifting in some form, or repeatedly used your muscles to
counter some kind of resistance. These are called
resistance exercises which the experts believe could
strengthen our muscles; preserve bone mass, increase bone
density. Regular resistance training can help prevent the
bone-weakening disease, osteoporosis.
Walking and jogging are also important activities that bear
your body's weight and help build strong muscles and bones.
Other resistance workout include pull-ups, running, biking,
and rowing.
3. Helps Manage Your Weight
This benefit is well-known to all who are weight conscious
or trying to lose the extra pounds. Your body needs a
certain amount of calories every day just to function. If
you eat more calories than your body needs, it may be
stored as excess fat. For instance, if you have an excess
of 10kg fat, and each gram has some 9 calories, then you
have 90000 calories for your body to use!
Exercising helps you achieve or maintain a healthy weight
by stoking our metabolism, utilizing and burning the extra
calories. And if you exercise, your body works harder and
needs more fuel. Even after you stop exercising, your body
continues to burn calories at a modestly increased rate for
a few hours. The more intensely you workout, the more
calories you burn. By burning more calories than you take
in, you can reduce body fat, giving you a healthier body
composition. Losing body fat can make you look and feel
better and can reduce your risk of obesity.
4. Induces Quality Sleep at Night
Many people who have problems sleeping find doing moderate
exercise at least three hours before bedtime help in
relaxing and sleeping better at night. The recent
Hibernation Diet Theory teaches that regular exercise could
activate production of recovery hormones during sleep,
increases our body's metabolic rate and promotes
fat-burning. It makes a powerful association between poor
sleep and obesity, a disease that has been rising
dramatically in developed countries and has reached
epidemic levels in the United States. While most of us
would associate poor weight control with aging, low
metabolism rate, and poor eating habits, many other
research studies have also reported and pointed to the
relationship between insufficient sleep and weight gain.
So start today, get a good night's sleep, aim for eight
hours a night if you can, and add resistance workouts will
speed up your weight loss and the body will worker harder
at night.
5. Puts You in a Better Mood
We all know that it definitely feels good to have a strong,
flexible body that can do all the activities you enjoy and
be able to move your arms and legs freely without feeling
tightness or pain. But you may not know that exercising can
actually put you in a better mood.
Exercise combats depression by activating the
neurotransmitters, which are basically chemicals used by
our nerve cells to communicate with one another and often
associated with avoiding depression. The balance of these
neurotransmitters, namely serotonin and norepinephrine
plays a role in how we respond to daily events. When
experiencing stress, our level of serotonin, norepinephrine
or both may be out of equilibrium. Workouts may help
synchronize those brain chemicals.
Exercising also stimulates the production of endorphins,
another type of neurotransmitters that produce feelings of
well-being, provide for "natural" pain relief, and help you
relax.
Sounds good? If you just had a tough day at work and need
to let off some steam, go for a workout or a brisk
30-minute walk to calm yourself down.
Well, if you have not any form of physical training for a
long while and find it a pain to do so, I suggest that you
start doing it 2 times a week and slowly increasing to 3
and then 5 times or more a week. You can do 10 or 15
minutes bouts of workout each time to make up a 30 minutes
session a day.
6. Inspires Your Lymphatic System to Work Better
Now, this is a relatively new knowledge for me and thus has
become my latest edition to this page (which was previously
known as "5 Great Reasons Why We Need to Exercise"). While
the above reasons have given us enough incentive to
workout, there is yet another reason which I never knew
before, the extremely essential lymphatic system. It is a
vital network of vessels and nodes responsible for
regulating fluids, distributing proteins and filtering out
poisons in the fluid between the cells. It is a protector
and a defence system against infection, viruses, bacteria,
fungi, and disease. The three most important methods of
lymphatic circulation are external massage, muscle
expansion and contraction, and intense exercise. This means
the more you move, the livelier it becomes. When the lymph
is not overloaded, our health is maintained with nature's
own detox design. But if the lymph is running sluggish and
there is too much waste, a blockage in the lymphatic system
happens, leading to symptoms like chronic fatigue, water
retention, allergies, eczema, arthritis, and infections.
For a more detailed account on this topic, read "Exercise
Inspires Your Lymphatic System to Work Better".
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Ruth Tan is the owner of the website Benefits of Honey at
http://www.benefits-of-honey.com which is an immensely
rich, quality resource on honey and its benefits, and a
plethora of health-related issues.
