Health Benefits Of Exercise and Staying Motivated

Exercising can significantly improve our overall well being. Though it can be very hard to begin, let alone maintain an exercise regiment for a lot of people out there, the benefits fat outweigh the struggle to get a routine going.

Here are some great benefits of exercise

Health: Exercising is essential to our health on so many levels with enormous benefits, including heart health, cancer prevention, glowing skin, and an overall positive attitude. Everyone wants a fit and strong body but getting started with exercise is the toughest part. 

Don’t exercise to lose weight or just for one particular reason, in actuality exercising should be an ongoing activity for a healthy you. Remember to consult with your doctor if you are going to increase beyond moderate exercise.

Weight: Exercise can help bring your weight down and help in maintaining healthy body weight. Weight loss can reduce blood pressure and cholesterol levels, but if you need to lose weight, you have to diet as well as increase activity. Weight gain is essentially due to the energy intake from the diet or food being more significant than the energy expended through physical activity.

To lose weight, you have to make your physical activity (expendable energy)  higher than the energy intake from food. Unfortunately, what happens many occasions when people diet and exercise to lose weight, once they reach their weight loss a goal, they go back to their old exercising and dieting habits and gain back all the weight that they had lost and maybe gain more.

For this reason, don’t exercise to lose weight; your goal should be indefinite; it is an ongoing fit and healthy thing.

Fitness: Simply put, fitness is the body’s ability to adapt to and stand physical stress. This ability is to accomplish everyday tasks vigorously and swiftly without excessive fatigue and with sufficient energy left over to devote to the full enjoyment of leisure time and to deal with emergencies.

Performing regular exercise is the most efficient way to attain, manage, and improve your fitness level. Proper exercise can help to boost energy levels, enhance fitness, lose weight, prevent diseases such as obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes and hypertension. Whatever your current fitness state is, it can always be improved. The aid of a personal trainer can also be a worthwhile investment.

Depression: Exercise stimulates the brain and helps in blood circulation in a better manner, thus reducing depression. Exercise can raise your mood and reduce anxiety and depression; it is a depression treatment that doesn’t involve any medication or chemical antidepressants.

You can have a better result in treating depression with exercise than with any antidepressants and another kind of drugs. Interesting clinical research pointed out that not only can exercise beat severe depression, but it also helps stop depression from reappearing. The hazard of depression and anxiety symptoms increases dramatically when people stop exercising.

Heart: Exercising lets the heart pump lots of blood through your veins, strengthening the immune system and lowering the risk of heart disease, high blood pressure, obesity, and osteoporosis. Aerobic exercise trains the heart, lungs, and cardiovascular system as a whole to process and deliver oxygen more quickly and efficiently to all parts of the body.

As you become more aerobically fit, the heart won’t have to work as hard to pump blood to the rest of the party, including the liver. 120 – 160 minutes of aerobic activity can help control cholesterol, high blood pressure, and diabetes and cut the risk of heart disease.

Anxiety: Exercise will raise one’s mood and reduces stress and depression. Anxiety can feed on itself, the more anxious you feel, the more you worry about having an anxiety attack.

Exercise improves sleeping patterns and reduces the levels of anxiety; it can also help to combat mental problems such as mental tension, depression, anxiety and generally helps us to stay happy in our life. Social anxiety or social phobia as it is sometimes known causes people to become overwhelmed by everyday situations.

Situations that most people take no notice of can drive a person who suffers from anxiety into deep fear and sometimes panics. Social anxiety disorder can overtake someone’s life if they allow it to.

Eyes On The Prize

If you ever feel like you’re losing motivation, remember why you started in the first place. Something motivated you to embark on your fitness journey. Make a literal note of this motivator and keep it somewhere you’ll see it a few times each day. This way, you’ll be able to face the reason(s) you were motivated in the first place.

Accountability Partner

Many people fail to reach their goals because they succumb to their own mind. One missed day turns into a week and, before you know it, you’re out of a routine. To prevent this from happening, find yourself an accountability partner.

This is someone who will hold you accountable for your actions (or lack thereof), and you will serve a mutual role for them. If you have a personal trainer, they can also serve as an excellent accountability partner to you.

Align Your Home Environment

In order to stay motivated, it is very important to have your home reflect your goals. You’re home environment can sharply impact your motivation. A messy, unkept living space reflects a lack of self-care and laziness. The two aforementioned traits are toxic to motivation and fitness goals. Ridding yourself of a messy environment can help you stay on track.

Micro Goals

Listen, macro goals are awesome. But, they’re usually pretty far out of reach in the beginning. Staring at the mountain of the journey that lies ahead can be quite daunting. To keep yourself from getting overwhelmed, set micro goals for yourself.

For example, set quantifiable goals such as losing 5% of your body weight, or increasing the amount of weight you’re able to use for a particular lift by 10lbs. These small victories will eventually amount to your larger goals.

Change It Up

Personal trainers will do a great job of doing this for you. If you don’t have a personal trainer, the responsibility is going to fall on your shoulders. Change up the workouts that you’re including in each targeted workout.

Many programs and personal trainers will have you target a different body area (i.e Chest, Legs, Core) once a week. They will have you do the same workouts for 4 sessions, then switch up the entire workout for each muscle group. Install this into your personal routine to keep things exciting and new.

Sign A Commitment Contract

Whether you set a commitment system up for yourself or make a pledge in front of your friends; set yourself up for success. Set up a system where you have to Venmo someone or your personal trainer $20 each time you skip out on a workout. This contractual motivator may keep you on track on those days where you just don’t feel like getting after it.