It is well-known to everybody that exercise has all kinds of benefits for the body, physical and mental. Actually, I just finished a 30-minute walk prior to writing this post, and I must say, my brain feels more alert and inspired for writing, compared to days of not exercising before writing a post.
More Than Just Weight Loss…
I often hear it, even from friends and family members sometimes: ‘why does she exercise? She is thin, she doesn’t need exercise!’. So wrong. A lot of people think that you only need to exercise if you want to lose weight.
We all need to exercise despite our body type, because exercise gives us physical benefits, but it also gives us mental benefits.
Next, I will discuss both physical and mental benefits of exercise.
Physical Benefits of exercise
– Weight Loss. People gain weight, and then try to lose it through exercise. But let’s keep in mind that for weight loss, what helps most is a combination of a healthy diet with aerobic exercise (aerobic exercise is anything that makes your heart beat faster, like
walking, running, biking, swimming etc). If you don’t make any changes in your diet, then exercise alone is not enough to help you lose weight.
– Strengthening the Muscles. Let me say that I often see thin women with a beautiful body, but weak and lose muscles. And all they need is some strengthening exercises to make their body strong and even more beautiful.
Strengthening exercises will help you do your everyday activities more easily, like doing housework, or lifting heavy grocery bags without getting tired or afraid that you will have pain in your lower back and knees.
Strengthening exercises can be performed by lifting weights, using bands, using your own weight, or doing floorwork. Check out this post on floor exercises to help you get started. All you need is a mat.
– Reduces the symptoms of various health conditions. Exercise helps to reduce the symptoms of diabetes, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, cardiovascular disease, and more. Of course, if you have a health condition, always check with your doctor before you begin exercise, or after exercising for a while, if you need to reduce any medication.
– Improves the cardiovascular system. Although all types of exercise help to improve the cardiovascular system, aerobic exercise helps even more. It is ‘exercise for the heart’ as I like to call it. You need to keep your heart strong with exercise, because the heart to the body is like the sun to the universe: without it nothing works!
– It gives your body more endurance. How would you feel if you could run a marathon? Pretty good I guess. And I am sure many of you can do it. But I also know a lot of you who would get tired just to go from one room of the house to the other. Again, aerobic type of exercise is what will help you improve your endurance so you won’t be afraid to run even just a little bit. (Yes, I know people who think they will die if they run even for 5 seconds!). And you never know, maybe one day you WILL run a marathon.
Mental Benefits Of Exercise
Besides the many physical benefits of exercise, there are also many mental benefits, which are also very important to take into consideration.
– It helps reduce anxiety and depression, and turns negative mood into positive. People who suffer from anxiety and depression, can reduce their symptoms by including any type of exercise in their everyday lives. Yoga for example, can help them relax their body and mind, and make them have more positive thoughts than negative. On the other hand, a more intense type of exercise like a brisk walk or run can also help them release a lot of energy and eventually relax their mind. Don’t forget that exercise releases endorphins, or as we like to call it, ‘happy hormones’, which help people be in a better, happier mood.
– Improves sleep. Exercise can help people release a lot of tension, which therefore will lead to a better sleep.
– More self-esteem and self-confidence. When we exercise, we tend to have more positive thoughts. This includes thoughts about the way we see our body, and usually we like our bodies better when exercising, which in turn gives us more self-confidence to dare to do things we might couldn’t do before. For example, ask the girl or boy you like for a date, or ask your boss for that promotion etc.
– Become more social. As I mentioned above, exercise helps people have more self-esteem and self-confidence. And people with
more self-confidence tend to be more social as well. They feel better about their bodies and it is easier for them to go and talk to other people, make friendships etc.
– It helps people with schizophrenia. Although the many studies on the subject are not very clear because each individual is different, it seems like there is a positive connection between exercise and schizophrenia.
It helps people be a bit more focused and alerted in the present than in their hallucinations. It also helps with their self-esteem and having better social relations. Also, it gives them an increased interest in doing things, because lack of interest in general is another symptom of schizophrenia.
Also the studies show that people with schizophrenia have a tendency of increased weight, usually because they cannot focus into a healthy diet and exercise plan, or maybe their medication is causing them to gain weight. So adopting an exercise plan can help them control their weight gain.
And let’s not forget that exercise can give the individual an increased energy, because low energy is another symptom of schizophrenia.
How Much Should We Exercise To Get The Mental Benefits?
Research shows that you don’t need to exercise 2-3 hours a day to get all the mental benefits from exercise. Even small 15-30 minutes of easy/moderate exercise will give you the mental benefits your body needs.
And you don’t even have to do it all at once. You can break your exercise in to smaller blocks during the day. For example, you can do 3 x 10 minute walks during the day.
Conclusion
So when you feel worried about something, or something that happened within your day is causing you a lot of stress, the best medicine is to do some exercise. You will immediately feel better and the stress will reduce. Exercise helps you break the negative thoughts and turn you into more positive ones, so that the problem you are facing will get smaller, not bigger.
If you want to start exercising but you don’t know where to begin, check out my post on easy exercises you can do at home. It is an easy intro into exercise, so I hope you enjoy it.