There are many different kinds of exercise that one can choose to perform and improve their fitness with. Every day, more and more people are starting to take up physical exercise. Many start working out regularly for the health benefits that come with exercise.
We all know it's healthy for most of us to be exercising regularly. However, most people do not actually know what these benefits are. Most do not actually know the benefits that they're getting out of their hard work doing this exercise.
That's why in this post, I'll be going over the top 12 best benefits that come with regularly working out. So without further hesitation, here are the top benefits of regular exercise for your body.
The Top 11 Benefits of Regular Exercise
Exercising Can Help Improve Your Mood
One of the first, and probably best benefits that come with regular exercise and working out is that it can help make you a happier person in day to day life, and improve your general mood.
It's been shown in studies such as this one by Ipek Ensari that exercising regularly can help you decrease your feelings of anxiety and stress, and make you an overall happier person throughout the day.
Working out causes changes in certain parts of the brain that are responsible for our feelings, and helps us produce more of the hormones that help to control our stress, anxiety, feelings of depression and so on.
To further support this idea, a study conducted by Jacob D Meyer looked at a group of women who had previously been diagnosed with depression. It was found that regular exercise, regardless of the intensity was able to reduce the feelings of depression in the women by quite a notable amount.
Several other studies have found similar results as well, it wasn't just the one or two that we've included on this post. Improving your mood through regular exercise is an idea that's back by a lot of science.
From all of this, it's pretty safe to assume that working out regularly is going to help improve your mood and make you an overall happier person in your day to day life. Definitely a great benefit of regular exercise.
Working Out Regularly Can Improve Your Sleep
The next benefit that regular exercise comes with is actually improved quality of your sleep. Since you exert force and expend more energy when you exercise, your body naturally needs to go through more processes during your sleep to restore lost energy.
Your body is going to need more rest since you're using up more energy, and this is going to have a positive effect on your quality of sleep and relaxation throughout the day.
A review of several studies found that subjects reported having better sleep quality and throughout the night, and also found that the time it took for these subjects to fall asleep (known as sleep latency) was reduced. So not only did this study find that regular exercise improved sleep quality, it also found that it helps you fall asleep quicker and more easily.
Some studies have also gone to show that regularly exercising can be more beneficial for older individuals, who are more prone to being affected by sleeping disorders and having trouble getting rest at night.
It seems that participating in some kind of physical training program is going to be beneficial to you and your ability to fall asleep as night, which is definitely a great bonus that comes with working out.
And in case you're wondering, both aerobic exercise and resistance training exercise seem to be effective ways of improving your sleep quality and making sure that you can properly relax when the time calls for it.
Exercising Helps Keep Your Bodyweight Under Control
There's no doubt that regularly exercising is going to help you keep your bodyweight in check. Our body needs fuel to run efficiently in our everyday lives. To provide this, we need to be eating and drinking enough.
However, it's quite easy for us to get carried away and accidentally eat more than we need to, and put on a bit of extra weight that we'd rather not have. You see, the energy that we consume is measured in calories. Sometimes kilojoules.
Everybody has a maintenance level of calories that they need to be eating everyday to maintain their bodyweight. Eating below this number is going to cause us to lose weight. Eating above this number is going to cause us to slowly gain weight.
Eating more calories than we burn is going to cause us to gain weight. Burning more than we eat is going to cause us to lose weight.
Thankfully, we are able to perform physical exercises of any kind, and burn some of those extra calories off to help keep our bodyweight in check.
Whether we do cardiovascular exercise, lift weights or play a sport, physical exercise is going to burn calories. And sometimes, that difference in calories is going to mean the difference between gaining or losing weight.
So if done right, regular exercise can help you keep your bodyweight in check an at a healthy level.
If you would like a calorie calculator, you can click here to use our favorite one by calculator.net. And if you want a free blog article that highlights the steps you should be taking when you create your own workout meal plan, you can click here to read our article.
Regular exercise helps to keep your bodyweight under control, and is a great benefit of working out that many people begin their fitness journeys for.
Regular Exercise Strengthens Your Bones and Muscles
Working out regularly is also going to help you strengthen your bones and muscles, making you a physically stronger and more capable human being.
Activities like weightlifting or calisthenics are going to simulate muscle growth and often strength gain, which are things that most people are wanting to have more of.
Your body recognizes the stress that you put it through, and realizes that it needs to grow bigger and stronger to ensure that over time, that physical activity becomes easier and easier. This is going to cause you to get stronger, fitter and grow larger muscles over time.
Also, as you get older, you'll naturally start to lose muscle mass and your physical capabilities. Doing regular exercise is not only good for building strength, it's a great way to maintain as much muscle and strength as possible, even as you start to grow older. This idea is supported in a study conducted by Stephen D Anton.
Exercise has also been found to increase your bone density from a young age, which can help with reducing the chance of osteoporosis in the later stages of life. Osteoporosis is a condition where your bones are weak, and more likely to fracture or break. Nobody wants that. Once again, this idea is supported in a study conducted by Mohamed S Zulfurina.
So regular physical exercise not only increases our strength and muscle mass, but it keeps our bones strong and healthy, reducing the chances of injuries later in life and helps keep us moving as efficiently as possible, for as long as possible throughout our lives.
Reduces Risk of Chronic Diseases
Working out regularly has been shown by several studies to do a combination of the following for our physical health: lower cholesterol and blood pressure, improve insulin and heart health at the same time.
This does wonders for our physical well being, and is great for helping us reduce the chances of facing chronic and possibly fatal diseases such as heart disease, type 2 diabetes and many types of cancers.
According to this study conducted by Frank W Booth, one of the primary causes of chronic diseases in humans is actually a lack of regular exercise and physical training. And it should be clear that exercising can help to significantly reduce our chances of developing these chronic conditions and diseases.
So regularly working out helps you to prevent yourself from developing chronic diseases. Who doesn't want that?
Regular Exercise Helps Reduce Pain
By reducing pain, we mean reducing all kinds of pain.
Studies have shown that regular physical exercise helps you to reduce the severity of your chronic pain, whether that comes from lower back discomfort, neck pain, lingering shoulder joint pain, etc.
This may sound a little counterintuitive, especially as many of us had previously thought that resting and physical inactivity was the way to reduce our physical chronic pain. However, this review of several studies did conclude that regular exercise was an effective way to reduce this pain and improve overall quality of everyday life as well.
And speaking from experience, our team members here at Gympulsive can also confirm that regular exercise can help to reduce this chronic pain. During the COVID-19 pandemic when workouts were tougher to get through, chronic pain in areas such as the shoulders and lower back were amplified and felt more severely. There was a noticeable difference between this and the severity of it prior to lockdown, when we were able to train freely at the gym daily.
On top of this, studies have actually come to show that regular exercise helps to increase our pain tolerance and decreases our sensitivity to physical pain. Every time we accidentally kick the door, or every time we bump into the side of the wall with our shoulder, it's going to hurt less. This is actually a pretty interesting benefit of regularly working out.
And you can check out this study here conducted by Matthew D Jones to see for yourself.
Working Out Regularly Helps to Improve Brain Health
Next up, it seems that exercising and improving our physical well being also helps to improve our brain health!
It's been shown in several studies that regular exercise helps us to increase the physical size of our hippocampus, which is a part of our brain that's crucial to helping us remember and learn new things. So physical exercise actually does have a great impact on our ability to memorize and learn new things, which is great for absolutely everybody, but especially so for people in school, entrepreneurs, etc.
It's also been shown that exercise can help to increase our production of hormones that are responsible for growth of our brain cells. And it also gets the heart rate pumping faster, which we all know drives more blood and oxygen to the brain. Kept in healthy levels, this is definitely a bonus that we'd all benefit from.
Not only does regular exercise help us become smarter, it's also great for preserving our brain health as we age, and protecting our brains' ability to function properly.
Working Out Increases Your Energy Levels
This might sound a little counterintuitive, as we do seem to get pretty tired after working out if we train intensely. However, it's actually been shown in several studies to increase our energy levels in everyday life, and helps to keep us feeling as good as possible.
For example, this study conducted by Bryan D. Loy found that even just 6 short weeks of regular exercise resulted in reduced feelings of fatigue in 0ver 30 individuals, all of which had previously reported constantly feeling fatigued.
Several other studies have concluded that regular exercise allows people that suffer from chronic and serious diseases such as cancer to experience less fatigue throughout the day as well. And this study conducted by Lillebeth Larun also found that regular exercise is a more effective way of reducing fatigue than more traditional methods such as rest and inactivity.
Now, there are likely several reasons as to why exercise actually helps us to increase our energy levels throughout the day. One of them would be the fact that it allows us to get better sleep during the night. We already discussed this earlier. It makes sense that getting better sleep is going to lead us to feel more energized throughout the day.
Exercise also improves our cardiovascular health and fitness, which is going to increase our endurance throughout the day and leave us feeling less fatigued, doing the dame activity day in and day out. Being fitter increases our ability to perform everyday tasks without feeling as fatigued and tired afterwards.
Exercise also seems to increase our endorphin levels, which is the natural hormone that helps to reduce our feelings of stress and anxiety. This reduces our mental fatigue, and helps to increase our energy levels throughout the day in our various activities.
Aside from these few, there are some other reasons as to why exercise helps to increase our energy levels. But we'd say that these are some of the main ones.
Exercise Can Help Us Live Longer
Another great benefits of regular exercise is that it can actually help us to live longer. This goes hand in hand with several of the other benefits on this post.
By reducing our chances of developing chronic and possibly fatal diseases, exercise can directly help us to live for longer. By reducing our chances of developing diseases such as cancer and diabetes, regularly working out can directly help us to increase our lifespan.
Regular exercise also improves the health of our bones, muscles and joints, which can actually help us to live longer. Death by accidents and physical injury are sometimes miraculously avoided due to people having built up strong bones, muscles and joints over time through regular physical exercise.
You never know what's going to happen in life, and it's always good to do whatever you can to improve your chances of survival, should something happen unexpectedly.
Lastly, regular exercise also helps with our balance, which can come in useful n various real life situations, especially when we're older and our bodies naturally start to weaken. Improving our balance helps to reduce our chances of falling and breaking something, or suffering sever injuries.
Working Out Increases Your Confidence
Many people struggle with the issue of having low self esteem or low self confidence. Many people are not confident in the way that they look, their own abilities to perform tasks, and so on.
This can actually have a huge impact on our overall quality and satisfaction of life. Many us miss life changing opportunities simply due to the fact that we're not confident in ourselves, and are too scared to fail. Others miss out on crucial love interests simply because we don't think we're good enough to try.
Having low self esteem and self confidence can prove detrimental to our every lives, and lead to serious regrets or huge wishes at the end of our lives, when we've got no time left.
However, it's been shown in studies that regular exercise helps us to increase our self esteem and self confidence, possibly due to the fact that most of us will see changes in our body, be more proud of the way that we look and be more confident in meeting new people, taking on new challenges, etc.
Regardless of your weight, gender, age, working out regularly can have a huge, positive effect on your self image. Regular exercise often helps to show us our true capabilities, and helps us realize that we're more capable than we previously thought we were. We're physically stronger than we thought, fitter than we thought, etc.
Who doesn't want to be more confident in everyday life? This is perhaps one of the best benefits on this post that comes with regular exercise. It can have direct impacts on our ability to meet new people, face new challenges, take more (good) risks, etc.
Exercise Can Improve Your Sex Life
Last but not least, it's also been shown that regular exercise can help to improve your sex life. According to several studies such as this one by Amelia M Stanton, regular exercise can actually improve your sex drive and help you perform better with your partners.
A review of many studies found that regularly exercising for 6 months helps to significantly improve the erectile function of men, which is definitely an added bonus in sex life. Other studies have found that even the most simple of exercise such as a short walk around the house helps to reduce the symptoms of erectile dysfunction by quite significant amounts. You can check this study here to see for yourself.
There were many more benefits of regular exercise that directly impacts sex life, but we'll leave those out for this post. The point is, regular exercise is great for increasing our ability to perform with sexual partners, and dramatically improves our lives in that way as well.
Conclusion
All in all, regular physical exercise has many, many benefits that do wonders at improving the overall quality of our lives, in pretty much every aspect of life as well. If you're currently debating whether or not you should take up some form of physical exercise, let this be your sign to start!
Let this be your sign to introduce new changes to your lifestyle, self image, fitness and general well-being! Exercising has many more benefits than this. We picked the 11 that we felt were most relevant for most people, and are the most important to most as well.
If you need help getting started with your fitness, head over to our training programs page and pick up some of our free training programs to kickstart your journey and boost gains!
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