THE OTHER BENEFITS OF EXERCISE & FITNESS

February 21, 2018

Happy #WorkoutWednesday, ladies! For today’s fitness post, I want to take it somewhere a little different. In most of my fitness posts I talk about how it affects your body, how it affects my body, and other physical topics. But for today’s post I want to talk about some of the other benefits of exercise and fitness (physical and otherwise). I covered the benefits that I think are most applicable to you guys, but I also included the three main list-like sources I used at the end if you want to find more benefits. Don’t be afraid to click within those sources and check their sources like I did, too. And for more benefits, hit up Google Scholar (my best friend) and read the work produced by the people who actually (mostly) know what they’re doing.

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PHYSICAL

So besides looking fit af, exercise produces many other physical benefits for your body. Especially important for women is that it helps your bones. As women, as we get older, our bones experience more stress and deterioration than men, in general. It’s just a fact of life. But exercise helps release chemicals that encourage your bones to absorb amino acids which help them grow and stay strong. But the bone benefits aren’t just for the aging, as teenagers and young adults, exercise helps increase bone density. And increasing bone density while we’re young helps a lot when our bone density decreases as we get older. See how that’s all tied in here? Your bones are stronger, which also means you’re less likely to experience breaks and other damage from “minor” incidents.

When you exercise regularly, you’ll also find that you sleep a lot better. Not just because you burned energy and became tired (exercise actually makes you more energetic, in part by improving cardiovascular health). It’s thought that exercise helps with temperature regulation, which helps your body adjust and relax at bedtime. It does also deplete your energy reserves, so after the initial cardiovascular energy boost, at bed time you will feel more tired. Regular exercise (especially aerobic), has also been shown to help with insomnia and related sleep disorders.

Finally, if you suffer from chronic pain or find that you are a person especially sensitive to pain, exercise will help. Gone are the days when we told people with chronic pain that they should be invalids and sedentary. Of course, you should rest a sprained ankle or broken bone, but you’ll be doing physical therapy soon! If you want some anecdotal evidence of how quickly exercise can reduce pain, here it is: Last Thursday, my hips were giving me a ton of trouble. It’s familial, most of the women on my mom’s side have developed arthritis in their hips. Anyway, mine were burning so bad I couldn’t do anything comfortably. We went to a yoga class on Friday, and our instructor focused on exercises targeted to the lower body. And I felt immediate, lasting relief in my hips. Ta-da! Yay, exercise!

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MENTAL

Maybe it’s just me, but the most important reason for working out are the mental benefits. Sure, I do love watching my endurance increase, becoming more flexible, and fitting more comfortably in my clothes. But what gets me going to the gym when I’m in a rut are the mental benefits.

Research shows that exercise can actually change the structure of the brain in a positive way, leading to decreased anxiety and depression. Exercise also produces endorphins, which make you happy, and happy people just don’t kill their husbands (thanks researchers and Elle Woods). Going out, hitting the gym, or just going for a walk, literally changes the chemistry happening in your brain. And the changes are all positive.

Not only does exercise help with your mental chemistry, but it can actually help with memory and improve your brain function and thinking ability. Y’all, this is so essential. Do you ever have those days where it feels like your brain is just done? Like, it’s reached it’s thinking capacity and the only thing it can process now is trashy reality tv? Exercise can help with that. And that becomes increasingly important as we get older and our brain function and memory start to see significant declines.

So work your brain, and get to the gym!

EMOTIONAL

The mental and emotional benefits of exercise go hand-in-hand, but I want to talk about the emotional benefits separately for a moment. Especially because I feel like as a society, we see these things as two totally different subjects. When discussing the mental health “debate,” I see a lot of people ignore their own powerful emotions and say they don’t have any mental health issues because they haven’t been diagnosed. Huh? I’m not the most active on Twitter for this reason: ignorance reigns supreme – especially in my feeds for some reason.

Anywhooooo, your the mental benefits of exercise play into the emotional. Exercise gives you a mood boost and makes you happier. It does that by affecting your brain chemistry and structure because that’s where our emotions come from. The same way our pancreas produces insulin, our brains produce endorphins, serotonin, and all of our emotional chemicals. So exercise benefits our mental health, in terms of the ability to cope with anxiety and depression, but also our emotions, on a less intense level. Maybe you don’t struggle with anxiety or depression, exercise will still help you because we all have bad days. And if you’re having a particularly bad day, a little bit of physical activity (doesn’t have to be anything crazy or intense!) can make it better.

You’re also going to be happier just knowing you did something good for your body. It’s just like the satisfaction of crossing something off your to-do list, you feel productive and that productivity makes you feel good.

So get out, and work out.

Do you work out regularly? If so, what is the biggest reason you like to go?

P.S. Here are the three primary sources for today’s post. If you want to know more, click out to their sources and read those articles in depth, and use Google Scholar to find any counter arguments or support.