Top Ten Reasons for Regular Exercise - Part 1
August 4th, 2008 Posted by David Lemberg
1. Looking good. 
C’mon, you know it’s true. Everything else is really important, but looking good is number one!
2. Lean muscle mass burns fat for energy. Physiologically speaking, this is the bottom line. Excess fat creates all kinds of problems, increasing the potential for diabetes, heart disease, various kinds of arthritis, and even cancer.
Recent medical research has shown that fat cells are tiny metabolic factories. They don’t just sit there on your belly or thighs, they’re busy churning out a large variety of proteins that can lead to illness and disease.
So, it’s a very good idea to reduce your level of body fat to the amount that’s healthy for you. This amount can be estimated, not calculated exactly, but your body knows what to do once it’s provided with the right raw material.
The lean muscle mass you build during regular, consistent exercise is a natural fat-fighter. Lean muscle mass is metabolically active and requires a lot of energy - this energy comes from fat cells. When you’re fit, your body even burns fat (consumes calories) when you’re watching TV or sleeping.
3. Flexibility. This benefit could also be named “use it or lose it”. Our bodies were designed for vigorous physical work - hunting and gathering. In the 21st century, there aren’t a lot of four-legged predators around to keep us on our toes. Most of us have jobs that are sedentary. We need to keep the parts moving.
Exercise revitalizes muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints by bringing lots of blood to these tissues. And, most forms of exercise are full range-of-motion activities, renewing muscle and joint flexibility during each exercise session.
4. Injury prevention. As I just mentioned, most exercises train your muscles and joints throughout their full range of motion. These muscles and joints are learning to adjust dynamically to mechanical loads, often at the extremes of motion. This highly beneficial training has many real-world applications outside the four walls of your gym.
Let’s say you’re out for a walk in New York City or San Francisco, admiring the scenery. Suddenly you step on an uneven section of pavement or your shoe gets caught momentarily in a metal grating, and your ankle turns over. Maybe your ankle turns over really far. For some people, the result might be a bad ankle sprain. But the ankles of fit exercisers have been well-trained. Their ankles can tolerate extremes of position without damage being done to joint capsules, ligaments, or tendons. You stumble, shake it off, and walk away. Exercise time has been very well spent!
From another point of view, I know a lot of people who used to have back pain but don’t anymore because they started running or swimming. Periodic back injuries resolved with whole-body exercise. That’s pretty dramatic. Now running isn’t for everybody, but if you are able to run there are many unexpected benefits.
5. Weight management. For any weight-management food plan to be effective in the long-term, regular exercise needs to be part of the new lifestyle. Any popular diet can look like its working in the short-term. First, these diets are a real shock to the system, and most of them result in significant losses of water weight in the early going.
But most of the time, the weight lost in the first few weeks creeps back over the next few months. Possibly the person winds up weighing even more than they did when they started the fad diet.
What’s missing? First of all, what’s missing is a food plan that’s based on sound nutritional principles. Also, in the context of our Top 10 Reasons to Exercise Regularly, what’s missing is the exercise component. To effectively lose weight, a healthy food plan needs to be combined with a regular exercise plan.
In order to lose weight naturally, your body needs to be burning more calories than you’re taking in. Regular exercise raises what’s called your basal metabolic rate. This is the amount of energy your body uses when it’s resting. By building metabolically active lean muscle mass, regular exercise increases your body’s overall demand for energy.
You provide less fuel by eating less, and your new-and-improved fit metabolism will do the rest by burning off excess fat!
One Response to “Top Ten Reasons for Regular Exercise - Part 1”
Your blog is interesting!
Keep up the good work!
By Alex on Aug 16, 2008