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Promoting healthy living, choices and lyfestyles for everyone from athletes and health buffs to casual fitness and beginners.
exercise is Simple & Important
Many people are unaware as to how much exercise a person needs in their everyday lives just to maintain our body’s general mobility functions. Fitness enthusiasts will talk about weight loss, gaining strength, building muscle, fat reduction and so on but not everyone wants these things for themselves. Every life is different and the only way to find out what works for you is to ask yourself what you want.
Nowadays when I hear someone talking about starting to include daily exercise into their lives it is generally tied to a goal. This is a good thing. I do find though, that this discourages the ones that don’t have a particular goal for themselves and just want to be a little more active to maintain where they already are in life. Maintaining is also a good thing. No goal is better than the other. It is all based on preference.
So if we are not looking to lose weight, to gain strength, to be super flexible or to build up muscle mass, how much should we actually be exercising? The general exercising goal to aim for is 30 minutes a day to maintain and keep our body’s mobility functions happy in order for us to live our lives. If you wanted to aim for weight loss or specific fitness goals, you may need to exercise more than 30 minutes a day.
Next comes the question as to why? Why should we exercise at all? What would happen to our bodies if we didn’t exercise?
If we did not move for a full 2 weeks, we would feel the effects of that instantly. One of the many things that it will affect is your weight and your blood pressure. Calories is energy we get from food we eat every day and are burned off through
through movement. If we do not move for extended periods of time, less calories are burned leading to weight gain and increases your risk of high blood pressure.
Another very important thing that will be affected are your bones. The muscles we have are one of the many things in our bodies that protect our bones. If we do not continuously use those muscles, they will never get strong. As well as with age, our bones start to lose their density and if we lack any kind of movement will lead to brittle bones. Our bodies know how to respond to weight-bearing movements and if we lack that, in time our muscles and bones will weaken.
Lastly, our general well-being will suffer. As your body loses muscle tone and strength, your confidence to believe in your own capability will slowly disintegrate. Weight gain will lead to isolating ourselves from social events and will most definitely drive bad eating habits. When we exercise, our bodies produce endorphins which naturally help us feel good about ourselves.
If this is not enough to convince you to start moving around, my hopes is that you will eventually before it becomes even harder on yourself to or worse, possibly too late.
Exercising isn’t hard. It’s actually very simple and extremely important for us to live a healthy and happy life.