Benefits of Regular Exercise That Improve Your Life

But why is it useful? Do you know that people have found benefits of regular exercise?  I’m going to provide you a few reasons why regular exercise is so essential to your health so that if a doctor ever tells you, “do more physical activity… it’s Advantageous for you,” you can say, “I will… because NOW I know just how advantageous it is for me.”

Benefits of Regular Exercise

1. Heart Health

• Exercise reduces the stress on your heart while you’re doing your daily activities. You won’t get winded as easily when climbing stairs and won’t need as many breaks if you’re playing outside. It helps lower your blood pressure and your cholesterol. It helps protect you from a heart attack, and if you’ve already had one, then it can protect you from getting a second one.

2. Brain Function

• It improves your cognition! Improves your attention and therefore school performance in you or your kids! It also enhances perception in people who have Alzheimer’s or dementia. So all groups of people can benefit.

3. Diabetes

• The most common type of diabetes is Type 2, aka insulin-resistant diabetes. Your body can still make insulin, which helps your body use the sugar in your blood.
• The problem is that your body has become resistant to it, so even though you have insulin, you don’t use the sugar, so you get high sugar in your blood, which does all kinds of nasty things to the rest of your organs.  But that’s a topic I will talk about another time. How does exercise help? It makes your body more sensitive to insulin. This means that regular exercise may normalize your blood sugar without any medications. One of the benefits of regular exercise that most people don’t know.
• Or, if you are taking medications, it can help reduce the amount you need to take and even the amount. Or it will just help amplify the effects of your drugs and keep your blood sugar within acceptable levels. Read More: eight reasons why you still want to eat—even after you just ate.

4. Chronic Pain Symptoms

• Chronic pain can be, and often is, debilitating. Chronic back pain, neck pain, and illnesses such as fibromyalgia cause severe distress and loss of quality of life for those diagnosed. The evidence is a bit mixed, and results are more subjective, meaning that it’s based on people’s words rather than some kind of objective measurement. Exercise has been shown to improve pain symptoms in multiple types of pain: lower back pain, fibromyalgia, rheumatoid arthritis, and even osteoarthritis (from overuse). Important to know here exercises, if never done before, will cause NORMAL muscle soreness. The more you do it, the more your body will get used to it, and the pain will decrease. Don’t get discouraged. You can do it!

Exercising improves your bone strength, which means that even if you lose your balance, trip, or fall, you are better protected against injury. Muscle strength is a good predictor of bone strength. You are less likely to break something. How does exercise improve bone strength? Bones are meant to give support to the body, mainly the muscles… ✓ The bones in your body adapt to the forces put on your muscles so that if you exercise them regularly, your bones will grow more robust so they can maintain your muscle mass without injury. It’s kind of like how your muscles become as you carry more weight.

The muscle adapts to the pressure put on it. The bones do the same: more exercise, stronger muscles, and stronger bones. The best way to do this is an exercise that uses gravity—resistance training. So, although there are benefits to walking and running, the best activities to benefit your bones are resistance training like weight training or vibration exercises (meaning standing over a vibrating platform). The best form of exercise regimen is one that includes weight training, endurance like cardiorespiratory exercise, and practices that improve flexibility.

7. Immunity?

• Exercise improves your immunity! Although endurance trainers and elite athletes often report upper respiratory infections, regular moderate-intensity exercise enhances your protection! This is extremely important for all of you, including me! But even more so among patients who are at higher risk of infections, like those with diabetes, older age, HIV, and cancer.

8. Quality of Life?

• Quality of life refers to specific life attributes, including physical wellbeing, emotional wellbeing, health status, and disease status. Exercise has been linked to improved quality of experience in the elderly, those with cancer, those with chronic diseases like diabetes, and even those with Parkinson’s disease.

9. Sleep Quality?

• Regular exercise improves sleep quality. For students, for example, activity should be maintained, especially during times of high stress, such as exam week, to buffer the harmful effects of this stress. Training also increased sleep duration and deep sleep while decreasing light sleep. Also, regular exercise can improve sleep time among older adults as well. There is also support for the idea that overall fitness predicts sleep quality. The lower physical activity lends itself to an increased risk of insomnia. It even improves sleep in those diagnosed with diabetes, sleep apnea, obesity, hypertension (high blood pressure), rheumatoid arthritis, and postpartum women (after giving birth). In sleep apnea, severity was decreased by weight training, not weight loss.

10. Mood?

• Exercise has been shown to improve symptoms of depression, anxiety, and negative mood. It even enhances low self-esteem. Not only that, but it has been shown to improve mental health in those with bipolar disorder, although the data is relatively new.

11. Healthy Weight?

Regular exercise helps suppress your appetite. This means that if you are exercising REGULARLY being the KEY…. You won’t have those nagging feelings of wanting to eat everything in sight.  Of course, this isn’t the only reason you would want to eat everything you see. You can check out my other post on eight goals for why you want to eat everything! Don’t forget that for maintaining a healthy weight, the number of calories IN must equal the number of calories OUT.

This is why BOTH diet and exercise are essential. If you eat 5000 calories a day and only burn 200 calories every day… you will gain weight. This is just the way it is. So to maintain a healthy weight, or to get there… you have to eat right… and exercise regularly so you don’t always feel hungry, so your body can use energy better throughout the day, and you can and will get to your weight goals.