Top 5 Benefits of Exercise
When you’re young and living a fast-paced lifestyle, you’re prone to nurture habits that do you more harm than good. Stress from work together with poor eating habits means you’re more at risk of serious illnesses like cardiovascular diseases. Furthermore, unproductive habits like watching TV or napping for long periods of time could further exacerbate this risk.
A good way to minimise these risks is through regular exercise. When you begin incorporating an exercise regime in your daily life, you’re set to reap the many benefits of exercise. Beyond improving your physical health, the benefits of exercise could further improve your mental health and social relationships. Read on to know more.
1. Get a Healthier Body with Exercise
Regular exercise helps with achieving and maintaining a healthy body weight, which is key to reducing the risk of chronic diseases. Even a small amount of weight loss of your total body weight, could lower you blood pressure, stabilises your blood sugar levels, reduce your blood cholesterol as well as boost your stamina.
As you continue to lose weight, the benefits of exercise will steadily add up. Sticking to a healthy lifestyle through regular exercise and a balanced diet could prevent you from developing chronic illnesses like cardiovascular disease1 and diabetes2.
2. Destress and Have Some Fun!
Stress relief is one of the best benefits of exercise. Exercising releases endorphins, which are chemicals that help relieve stress and improves mood. The key to making exercise fun, is to practice a workout and pace that you find enjoyable.
However, beware of being carried away with exercise and pushing your bodies too hard. You might strain your muscles or severely injure yourself. To fully reap the destressing benefit of exercise, try your best to enjoy the sessions and keep to the safety precautions.
3. It’s Great for the Skin Too
According to dermatologists3, skin deterioration is caused by oxidative stress4, where your body’s antioxidant defenses fail to repair the cellular damage done free radicals.
While using skincare products with antioxidants is a common way to counter this issue, more research5 seems to suggest that moderate and regular physical activity could help too. Exercise boosts the body’s natural production of antioxidants, allowing you to maintain good skin
4. Have Trouble Sleeping?
Since one of the clear benefits of exercise is to relieve stress, it’s not a surprise that regular physical activity could improve your sleeping habits. The Journal of Behavioural Medicine published a research6 showing that regular exercise has positive impacts to sleep quality.
As you develop a long-term habit of regular exercise, your sleeping habits will also continue to improve. Another study7 has found that 16 weeks of an aerobic physical activity has shown to improve sleep quality and helped people with insomnia sleep longer and deeper. The same research also reported that the subjects felt more energised during the day.
With exercise, you’ll be able to be more productive and revitalized as a result of all the good sleep you’ve been getting!
5. Builds Better Relationships
Earlier we’ve explored how exercise could improve your mood. Better emotional and mental health allows you to build healthy and better relationships with the people around you. If you’re with a partner, regular exercise has also been shown to improve the relationship and intimacy between couples8.
Why not share the mutual benefits of exercise by working out with a loved one? Since group exercises are a bit risky now due to the coronavirus, following a workout video together or training at home with a sibling is a great way to bond while staying fit.
Conclusion
To supplement the benefits of exercise you’re already getting from workouts, make sure that you are protected from unexpected accidents during exercise. Learn more about AIG’s flexible and comprehensive options at https://www.aig.my/personal/personal-accident-insurance.
Sources:
1) https://wa.kaiserpermanente.org/healthAndWellness?item=%2Fcommon%2FhealthAndWellness%2Fconditions%2FheartDisease%2FexerciseBenefit.html
2) https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15166299/
3) https://www.wellandgood.com/antioxidants-for-skin-benefits/#
4) https://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/324863#
5) http://journal.waocp.org/?sid=Entrez:PubMed&id=pmid:24568458&key=2014.15.2.561
6) https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10865-015-9617-6
7) https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1389945710002868?via%3Dihub
8) https://www.health.com/sex/exercise-and-sex