Today on the Regained Wellness Podcast I lay out 12 of the best reasons that you need to be exercising.
In This Episode You Will Learn:
- Specifically how exercise makes you lose weight
- It’s role in cardiovascular health
- How exercise combats diabetes
- The role in cognitive health and brain function
- How it improves bone strength
- Best choices for those with asthma
- How exercise can fight heart disease
- The improvement of mood and enhanced sleep
- The ability of exercise to reduce LDL cholesterol
- Exercise and anti-aging effects
- About my leg warmer collection
- What makes me hit the ground into the fetal position..
12 Reasons You Need to Exercise
Getting yourself out there with the mindset that you want to exercise is the first and most important step. Exercise takes on many forms, including weightlifting, jogging, biking, rowing, yoga, cross-fit, tennis, hitching, any recreational sports, and boot camps, swimming, even sweating to the oldies on your cassette tape or anything which helps you sweat.
Exercising on summer days is not advisable as it takes a toll on the body. The warm weather outside along with extra heat buildup in the body. Try exercising more on winter days, especially autumn, which is one of the best times for exercise. If you are not one of those, who exercise you should start it. Let’s look at 12 of the best reasons why you need to exercise.
Exercise Promotes Weight loss
Exercise helps the muscles to lose fat and also helps to form lean muscles and enhances your metabolism. Muscle keeps on metabolizing even when you are at rest. Thus, the leaner you are, the more efficient your body is at burning calories. High-intensity interval training or HIIT training, which is a type of workout that allows muscles to continue metabolizing even when you have stopped working out. It’s basically a high-intensity exercise for 30 to 45 seconds, followed by a low-intensity resting period of around 90 seconds.
This causes the body to use sugar during the high-intensity phase and fat during the low-intensity phase. This causes the body to lose more fat with less exercise than those who carry out the vigorous exercise. The advantage of this is it allows more excess post oxygen consumption (EPOC) for the body to replenish the oxygen depletion you experienced during high-intensity training. So you enter an after-burn effect since your body is breaking calories long after your high-intensity training.
So a basic high-intensity workout would be sprints on a stationary bike, where you perform an all-out sprint at a higher resistance. After that, for 90 seconds, sprints at lighter resistance. You may not want to do this every day; you should consider giving a day break in between high-intensity workout sessions.
Exercise helps prevent type 2 diabetes
Type 2 diabetes is non-insulin-dependent diabetes. Long term exercise and a balanced diet plan help prevent type 2 diabetes or control it. Type 2 diabetes was previously called adult-onset diabetes, but later it was discovered that teenagers, even kids aged 9-year old, can also have type 2 diabetes.
Exercise helps build strong bones and prevents osteoporosis
So high impact weight-bearing exercise helps to build bones and keeps them strong. High impact strength training may not be possible for many people. So they can try low impact training. Low impact strength training also helps build bones, which includes low impact cardio classes, biking, etc. basically, exercise helps to increase the mineral content of your bones. It also helps to decline the age-related decline of skeleton mass.
Exercise helps to protect you from getting heart diseases
Exercise makes your heart stronger so that it can pump more blood into your system. It also helps reduce blood pressure by increasing the diameter of the arteries and makes them more elastic. Exercise will also reduce the platelet from the blood, which will reduce clot formation in vessels. A lot of research has been put into determining the benefits of exercise, and all studies led to the fact that there is a strong relationship between exercise and a decrease in cardiovascular diseases.
Exercise Helps Improve cognitive functions
Researchers from the University of Manitoba have discovered that young adults who often run or carry out aerobic activities preserve their thinking and memory skills for middle age. Another study carried out in Finland says that middle-aged people who exercise have fewer chances of having dementia and other diseases in old age. This information has been published in ‘Psychology Today.’ Exercise is not only for young people. Even if you start at an older age, it can help you with proper cognitive functions, mental clarity, and better mental functions.
There is a certain test that helps to measure cognitive functions called the Stroop test. People who take that test need to tell the color of the word without saying the word. It’s a test to check if exercise is helping people improve their cognitive abilities.
Exercise helps to improve mood
Many of you may know exercise helps induce the release of endorphins. Endorphins bind to receptors in the brain and help reduce the perception of pain. People may feel tired, exhausted, or runner’s high after the workout session, but the workout itself helps to stimulate chemicals that reduce pain, which itself is interesting. Endorphins almost have the same effect as morphine. It diminishes pain and introduces a sensation of euphoria.
The problem with pain medication is that it can lead to addiction and dependency. On the other hand, exercise helps to trigger the body’s own pain killer and stimulate mood enhancers.
Exercise helps improve sleep
Exercise helps to improve the body’s circadian rhythm, which helps to keep your body active during the day and allow sleep during the night. A study found that people who exercise regularly tend to sleep better on most nights than those who do not exercise. Daytime physical activity can promote a longer period of slow-wave sleep, which is the deepest and most restorative portion of sleep.
Sleep helps to repair, grow, and adapt. If you want to build muscle, your muscle grows, and tissues get repaired when you sleep. Babies sleep a lot because this is when they are growing. Sleep is so important that a lack of it can cause you to lose every little battle of your life.
Exercise Reduces LDL Cholesterol
You may have heard of the good cholesterol HDL and bad cholesterol LDL. These are not exactly cholesterol but proteins, which tend to be a reservoir of cholesterol in your blood. Exercise helps to reduce LDL levels in the body; studies have also said that exercise helps to increase the transport of LDL from their blood into the liver, which will be expelled from the body.
Exercise Lower Blood Pressure
For the majority of people, an exercise is a drug-free approach to maintaining blood pressure. Exercise can lessen heart disease complications. It can lower your systolic blood pressure by an average of 4 to 9 mmHg. This is a great alternative to taking medicines, which bears some expense, while exercise is completely free.
Exercise can help prevent cold
Researchers suggest that people who exercise regularly are 23% less likely to catch a cold than those who don’t, as exercise helps boost a person’s immunity. Companies should provide their employees with the scope to carry out light exercises or free gym memberships since exercise can help prevent their employees from catching a cold or other light illnesses and thus increase productivity. Besides boosting your immune system, exercise helps strengthen your breathing muscles.
Exercise is a good choice for asthma patients
Exercise can also induce asthma in few people and increase complications. For those groups of people, it is suggested to have their asthma under control before carrying out any form of exercise.
But many people with asthma can carry out the exercise since their asthma is not stimulated or induced due to exercise but rather due to other factors. For these people, exercise can warm up their body, jolt their muscles, and improve their breathing rate. Enabling them to have better respiration and gaseous exchange.
Exercise has anti-aging effects
Exercise helps increase blood flow to the brain, arouses the brain, and slows down degenerative processes. Nerves are stimulated and make a person irrespective of their much more active and rejuvenated.
Conclusion
You should also mind the frequency and amount of exercise you are carrying out. Nothing should be done in excess. But do remember to introduce new stimulus in your exercise routine. This will help you to get a better and balanced workout routine. This will keep your body progressing. Try to slowly increase your workout frequency. Keep a 90-second interval between each type of workout sessions so that your fat burns and oxygen gets time to replenish.
