Why Exercise is Vital to Good Health and Well Being
Joel Peterson – Level 5 Personal Trainer Apple Athletic Club
I believe it’s virtually impossible to have optimal health without regular exercise—even if you eat properly. As we enter 2015 we can make goals to enter 2016 stronger and healthier than we are today.
A key health benefit of exercise is that it helps normalize your glucose, insulin, and leptin levels by optimizing insulin and leptin receptor sensitivity. This is a crucial factor for optimizing your overall health and preventing chronic disease, and may explain why exercise is such a potent preventive medicine.
Preventing obesity and diabetes, reducing stress, and lowering your blood pressure are among the most obvious boons. Maintaining a fitness regimen can also go a long way toward warding off a stroke. Inactivity can raise your risk for a stroke by as much as 20 percent, research shows, when compared to those who exercise at least four times a week. But the benefits certainly do not end there.
Researchers recently suggested that exercise is “the best preventive drug” for many common ailments, from psychiatric disorders to heart disease, diabetes, and cancer. According to Jordan Metzl, a sports-medicine physician at New York City’s Hospital for Special Surgery and author of The Exercise Cure, “Exercise is the best preventive drug we have, and everybody needs to take that medicine.”
High-intensity interval training (which requires but a fraction of the time compared to conventional cardio) has been shown to be far more efficient and effective, compared to longer, slower cardio workouts.
Medicine Against Cold and Flu
When you exercise, you increase circulation and blood flow throughout your body. The components of your immune system are also better circulated, which means your immune system has a better chance of finding an illness before it spreads. This includes (but is certainly not limited to) seasonal colds and influenza.
Walking with Good Posture is beneficial to our health
Compelling evidence actually suggests that even if you exercise regularly, prolonged sitting is itself a risk factor for chronic disease and reduced lifespan. Walking has been found to have significant health benefits, including the reduction of severe attacks associated with lung disease, and walking correctly will undoubtedly add to such benefits. Walk at a brisk pace with your head high and back straight, like there is a rope running through the top of your head down to your feet and is being pulled skyward. I love walking not only for the health benefits, but also for the mental calmness it gives me.
Stay Flexible
Poor posture and chronic pain is a common outgrowth of poor flexibility. The key lies in a chemical reaction that occurs in your muscles, which increases the elasticity of certain muscle proteins.
Many of our articles posted in 2014 have shown many exercises and stretching techniques to help you get going this year. Go back and review them, or read them for the first time. You will find valuable information on both exercise and nutrition that will enable and empower you to make 2015 your healthiest and strongest year ever. At least until 2016!