Exercise is any bodily activity that enhances or maintains physical fitness and overall health and wellness. It is performed for various reasons, including increasing growth and development, preventing aging, strengthening muscles and the cardiovascular system, improving athletic skills, weight loss or maintenance, and also for enjoyment.
Exercise is key to good health. But we tend to limit ourselves to one or two types of activity. People do what they enjoy, or what feels the most effective, so some aspects of exercise and fitness are ignored. Let's focus on 4 main type of exercise.
1. Aerobic exercise.
Aerobic exercise, which speeds up your heart rate and breathing, is important for many body functions. It gives your heart and lungs a workout and increases endurance. Aim for 150 minutes per week of moderate-intense activity like brisk walking, running, swimming, jogging, cycling or dancing. This type of exercise can reduce the risk of cardiovascular disease, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure, and may even lower the risk of cancer.
2. Strength training.
As we age, we lose muscle mass. Strength training builds it back. Regular strength training will help you feel more confident and capable of daily tasks like carrying groceries, gardening, and lifting heavier objects around the house. Strength training will also help you stand up from a chair, get off the floor, and climb the stairs.
Strengthening your muscles not only makes you stronger, but also stimulates bone growth, lowers blood sugar, assists with weight control, improves balance and posture, and reduces stress and pain in the lower back and joints.
It will likely include body weight exercises like squats, push-ups and crunches. Balance exercises improve your ability to control and stabilize your body's position.
3. Stretching.
Stretching helps maintain flexibility. We often overlook that in youth, when our muscles are healthier. But aging leads to a loss of flexibility in the muscles and tendons. Muscles shorten and don't function properly. That increases the risk of muscle cramps and pain, muscle damage, strains, joint pain, and falling, and it also makes it tough to get through daily activities, such as bending down to tie your shoes.
Likewise, stretching the muscles routinely makes them longer and more flexible, which increases your range of motion and reduces pain and the risk of injury.
Perform static stretches (holding a stretch position for up to 60 seconds) for the calves, the hamstrings, hip flexors, quadriceps, and the muscles of the shoulders, neck, and lower back.
However, don't push a stretch into the painful range. That tightens the muscle and is counterproductive.
4. Balance exercises
Improving your balance makes you feel steadier on your feet and helps prevent falls. It's especially important as we get older, when the systems that help us maintain balance, our vision, our inner ear, and our leg muscles and joints, tend to break down. The good news is that training your balance can help prevent and reverse these losses.
Yoga is a good example of balance exercise. It's never too early to start this type of exercise, even if you feel you don't have balance problems.
Benefits of exercise can never be overemphasized.
1. Exercise improves physical health.
Physically active individuals have a much better health outlook than their sedentary peers. Even modest regular physical activity has a positive influence on people's health and vitality. A minimum of 20 to 30 minutes of moderate activity a day most days of the week will benefit health and assist with weight loss.
2. Exercise reduces risks of serious illness.
Exercise reduces people's chances of developing and dying of illnesses such as heart disease, obesity etc. It does this by lowering illness risk factors such as triglyceride and overall cholesterol levels, while improving the level of HDL (the "good" cholesterol which is thought to reduce the risk of heart disease).
Weight-bearing exercise and strength training activities help to maintain or increase bone mass, reducing a person's risk for osteoarthritis and associated bone fractures. Regular exercise also lowers resting blood pressure rates for hours after an exercise session is over. In addition, moderate exercise may significantly reduce the risk of developing type II diabetes. Regular walking of over a mile a day has been shown to reduce the risk of arthritis and stroke significantly.
Exercise even appears to reduce the risk of developing some cancers, especially cancers of the breast and colon.
3. Exercise also improves people's capacity for work. People who exercise on a regular basis actually have more energy and greater strength and endurance for daily activities than do their sedentary peers. The feeling of increased energy, and vitality is one of the first things people tend to notice a few weeks after beginning to working out on a regular basis.
4. Exercise helps people perform activities of daily life more easily.
Physically fit people are stronger, healthier and more energetic than sedentary people. They are able to solve problems more readily, deal with stress more effectively, think faster and remember things more efficiently. Overall, activities of daily life become less of a chore for active people.
5. Exercise helps people to lose and maintain weight. An exercise session burns calories and elevates metabolic rate both during exercise and then for hours after exercise is completed. It helps to preserve and build lean muscle mass. All of these benefits work together to make exercise vital for maintaining weight loss.
6. Exercise improves mood.
Exercise helps people to relax, improves sleep and reduces muscular tension. That glow of relaxation after a workout is restorative. Research shows that one of the best things a person can do when depressed is to force themselves to exercise. The mood elevation effect is immediate.
7. Exercise improves self-confidence.
One of the reasons many individuals do not attempt an exercise program is because they feel they are not very athletic or coordinated. Once an exercise program is begun, these individuals discover that they are indeed able to work out successfully: gaining muscle tone and strength, improving their stamina, and improving how they feel emotionally. These revelations are very empowering. It is this increased sense of self confidence and improved sense of well-being that eventually becomes the sustaining force that helps people to continue their exercise program.
8. Exercise provides socialization opportunities. Exercising outside the home, whether in the great outdoors, at a gym or recreation center, in an exercise class, sport group, walking or running club, etc., all lead to encounters with other people who also enjoy working out. New acquaintances and friendships develop readily in such contexts. Over time, having the pleasure of one's exercise group's company becomes another reason to exercise.
Family relationships can benefit from exercise too. On days when the weather is nice the entire family may enjoy a walk together, thereby strengthening their relationship.
Make it a point of duty to exercise your body, because Your health, is Your wealth.
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