If you started a program of regular exercise to help you lose weight, good for you. You’re doing something extremely positive to change your lifestyle and ensure a healthier existence. However, regular exercise not only burns calories and builds muscle tissue to help you achieve weight goals quicker. It has some other amazing benefits for the body that not only extends your life, but makes those extra years even better. It adds years to your life and adds life to those years.
Reduce the potential for heart disease when you exercise regularly.
Exercise helps reduce the risk of heart disease in several ways. The heart is a muscle and like any muscle, to function its best it requires exercise. When you do cardio or endurance workouts, it makes the heart pump harder and helps build its efficiency. It pumps more blood in one beat, allowing it to pump slower, lowering blood pressure in the process. Exercise also lowers bad cholesterol levels and helps you lose weight, which is a bonus to heart health.
You’ll keep your muscles strong, which helps your bones to remain strong, too.
Weight bearing exercise and resistance exercise not only builds muscles, it builds bones, too. These types of exercise stimulate the body to create more bone tissue and boost the retention of calcium to aid in the density of the bone, so they can bear heavier loads. When you move, even when you walk, the bones twist, move and compress, which stimulates the bone to grow to prevent breaking. High impact activities, such as jumping, weight lifting or hitting a tennis ball with a racket, have the most effect on bone density.
You’ll lower your risk of diabetes, cancer and even feel better emotionally.
While improved physical health, like lowering the risk for serious diseases and even helping to control other diseases, such as diabetes, are important, so is your mental health. Studies show that regular exercise can help reduce depression and even help anxiety. Part of it comes from the “happy hormones” produced during exercise and the body burning off the hormones of stress. The other part may come from simply feeling healthier and the increased circulation exercise brings.
- Exercise improves your balance, strength and flexibility, which can help reduce injury and falls.
- Regular exercise helps to improve the quality of sleep and can aid those with insomnia.
- Exercise stimulates the growth of new neural pathways in the brain and improves cognitive thinking. It can help improve hormone levels of endorphins and serotonin.
- The increased circulation during exercise can help reduce plaque build-up by boosting the production of nitric oxide in the endothelial cells of the arteries.