Exercise
- Liz F
- Dec 28, 2022
- 11 min read
Introduction
Some people think of exercise as something they have to do for PE, others see it as a great way to have fun and get their energy out. Either way, regular exercise has a big impact on your body, both mentally and physically. The real question is, how does exercise actually affect your body? In general, exercise makes you stronger, healthier, fitter, and improves your quality of life. The types of physical activity include cardio or aerobic and muscle strengthening. Cardio exercise might be walking or biking and muscle strengthening is usually lifting weights or an exercise like squats. There are many different levels of impact, this includes different body parts, preventing disease, mental health, and more.
Different Body Parts: Let’s dive into the effect of exercise on a physical level. More specifically, what different parts of the body are affected and how they benefit.
Heart & Lungs
The heart and lungs are one of the main parts of the body impacted by exercise. The heart actually benefits after just 30 minutes of exercise as long as your heart rate is raised! First, exercise strengthens the heart, it allows it to work better and more efficiently, especially when pumping blood throughout your body. This blood is rich in oxygen and nutrients, therefore when the heart is able to pump blood in a better way, you will be healthier! In addition, when the heart becomes stronger, it can do its job easier because not as much work is required to pump the blood. Exercise takes a lot of strain off your heart. If the heart is doing its job better, the heart is able to push more blood out every time it beats, which means it is beating slower so that your blood pressure is under control. This is important because if your blood pressure gets too high your blood vessels and organs can be damaged. Also, exercise allows the heart to do a better job of pulling oxygen from your blood, giving you the ability to work well under stress and prevent you from feeling winded during high-intensity activities such as running. Another way exercise affects the heart is by allowing the small vessels near your heart to have better blood flow. By having better blood flow, clogs in the arteries are prevented. By preventing your arteries from getting clogged, you are also preventing a heart attack! There are some long-term benefits to exercise in regard to the heart as well. Exercise decreases resting heart rate, improves one’s ability to breath deeply, decreases resting blood pressure, and more. All of these benefits contribute to cholesterol, which is a substance found in your cells. Exercise can help to raise levels of your good cholesterol and reduce lowers of your bad cholesterol. Lungs just like hearts are strengthened by exercise. Also, physical activity helps to clear your lungs because you are breathing faster and heavier. This will loosen the saliva and mucus that is stuck in your lungs. Overall, exercise makes the heart and lungs healthier, and able to work more efficiently!
Brain
Just like exercise keeps your heart healthy, it also keeps your brain healthy. When you exercise, your heart rate rises, which means that the blood flow to your brain is rising as well. This means that your brain is getting more oxygen and nutrients. In addition, exercise helps release useful proteins in the brain. When these proteins are released, brain cells are healthier, and more brain cells can grow. Exercise also promotes the growth of blood vessels in the brain. Brain cells are very important for the function of the brain, so exercise is helping the brain to function! Another way exercise affects the brain is through your memory, which is controlled by the hippocampus, the prefrontal cortex, and medial temporal cortex. The volume of these cortexes is bigger in people who exercise. Exercise upgrades your long-term and short-term memory. Also, exercise improves the white matter integrity of your brain. White matter integrity is important for the cognitive function of the brain, which includes things such as learning, attention, decision making, language, and more. In one study, it was found that at least 7,500 steps daily helped to increase brain volume, which is always a good thing to have. This increased brain volume was equal to about 2 years of less brain aging. Exercise affects the brain in some unique ways too. First, exercise boosts the levels of dopamine circulating in your brain and results in more dopamine receptors. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter related to the reward system of our brain. Exercise helps to make your brain responsive to joy and reduces depression through dopamine. This is especially important because when we age we lose dopamine receptors, but exercise helps to reduce that decline. Next, during exercise, information goes to your brain telling it what is happening, which helps to improve your body image. For example, if you exercise gracefully, the limbs and other parts of your body tell you that you are graceful. Also, if you exercise powerfully, your muscles and speed tell you that you are powerful. In the end, this allows people to think more highly of themselves. Essentially all physical activity is good for your brain. All in all, exercise affects the brain in many beneficial ways, it makes it healthier, improves memory, function, and much more!
Bones
Another part of the body exercise affects is your bones. First, never exercising leads to the loss of bone, which means exercise is important for you to keep your bones. In a general sense, exercise makes your bones stronger. When you are young, exercise builds strong bones and when you are older, it maintains strong bones. Regular exercise increases the amount of bone in your body by making it denser. The higher your bone density is, the less likely it is for your bones to break. Throughout your lifetime, your bones continue to remodel themselves. Cells called osteoblasts help to remodel these newer healthy bones. Exercise promotes the remodeling of bones by having a greater compression force on the body. Also, once you reach the age of 40 your bone density starts to decline. However, exercise helps to minimize the amount of decline in your bone density. Lastly, exercise helps people to be more coordinated and balanced. When we are more coordinated and balanced, we are less likely to fall and break our bones. This is especially helpful in those with osteoporosis since osteoporosis makes bones weaker. Some of the best exercises for bones include walking, hiking, running, dancing, and different sports. Overall, just like other body parts, bones become stronger and healthier from exercise.
Muscular System
Muscles are what might first come to mind when you think about the effects of exercise. As you know, exercise makes your muscles stronger. Strong, healthy muscles are essential to have so that you can move freely, do fun activities, reduce your risk of exercise, and stay at a healthy range. In specifics, exercise has an effect on muscle hypertrophy. This means exercise increases your muscle mass, size, and strength. However, this is done by a certain type of exercise: strength training or weight lifting. Also, exercise increases the strength of your tendons, which is just as important as the strength of your muscles. Your tendons are the connective tissue that connects your bone and muscle. They need to be strong so that they can help your bones to move. If you want to be strong in general, you’ll need to improve your tendon strength, which comes from exercising! Additionally, exercise increases the strength of your ligaments. Ligaments are connective tissues that connect bone to bone, so they must stay strong and healthy in order to keep you strong and healthy! Finally, exercise improves your muscular endurance. Your muscular endurance is the ability of your muscle or muscles to perform repeated actions for a certain amount of time against a force. For example, holding a plank. When your muscular endurance is increased, you are able to complete a higher number of repeated actions. On the whole, exercise makes your muscles stronger, which leads you to be stronger!
Diseases & Conditions:
Another great effect exercise has on your body is preventing diseases and conditions. Let’s start with a cardiovascular illness. Physical activity can prevent heart disease by pushing out the bad cholesterol that clogs your arteries. Heart disease is a collection of conditions including coronary artery disease, stroke, cardiac arrest, high blood pressure, and more. Exercising daily makes you less at risk of heart disease in comparison to never exercising. Not exercising actually increases the risk of heart disease and dying from it just as much as smoking does. Specifically for people who have high blood pressure, exercise helps to reduce the risk of dying of heart disease or of the disease progressing. Another disease exercise is helpful for is diabetes. In those with diabetes, their body does not make enough insulin. Exercise helps your insulin work better in order to keep your blood sugar level low. Next, asthma. For some people exercise can make their asthma worse, but it does help asthma attacks be less severe and less frequent. Exercise also is beneficial for back pain. Exercise builds strength and endurance in your back muscles, which helps them function more easily. Specific exercises that target the abdominal or back muscle make the muscles around your spine become stronger, which reduces back pain. In addition, exercise helps with arthritis. Arthritis is inflammation of your joints. Exercise allows the joints that are inflamed to keep their strength and lower the stiffness of them. Exercise reduces pain, enhances function, and makes the quality of life better in those who are affected by arthritis. In specifics, exercise is useful for preventing knee osteoarthritis, which is when the flexible tissue at the ends of your knee bones wears down. Additionally, exercise can boost a past cancer patient’s quality of life and function. Exercise reduces the risk of death from breast, colorectal, or prostate cancer. As for neurological diseases, exercise is helpful for dementia. Dementia is not actually a disease, but rather a group of symptoms that interfere with daily life, such as memory loss. Those who exercise have a reduced risk of developing dementia and those with dementia can improve cognitively by exercising. Along with dementia, exercise can slow the progression of Alzheimer’s disease and set back when someone who is at risk of Alzheimer’s will develop the disease. Exercise can reduce symptoms in those with mild Alzheimer’s as well. As you can tell, exercise is rewarding for preventing and helping many different diseases, which is a very important benefit!
Mental Health:
Aside from the effects exercise has on your actual body, exercise also has an effect on your mental health. The first way exercise affects your mental health is through depression, anxiety, and ADHD. Studies have been shown that exercise has been as effective as antidepressants on those who are suffering from depression. Also, exercise helps to reduce the symptoms of depression. One study showed that 15 minutes of running a day reduces major depression by 26%. Exercise can help prevent people who are depressed from relapsing, which is when the symptoms of a disease return after reducing. This is because exercise leads to lots of healthy changes in the brain. These brain changes help calm feelings and release endorphins that give you energy and help you feel good. Exercise can also serve as a distraction from depressive thoughts. As for anxiety, exercise has been found to be a great anti-anxiety treatment. Physical activity reduces tension, boosts energy, and promotes well-being by the release of endorphins, very similar to how exercise helps depression. However, exercising mindfully is the best way to treat anxiety. This means focusing on your body and what you’re experiencing during exercise, this stops the anxiety worries from going through your head. Next is ADHD, which is attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Exercise reduces the symptoms of ADHD by improving focus, attention, and more. Exercise has this effect by increasing the brain’s dopamine, serotonin, and norepinephrine levels. These levels are related to focus and attention, which makes symptoms of ADHD less severe. Exercise affects mental health in other ways as well. One of the mental health aspects of exercise impacts is self-esteem. When you exercise regularly, you’ll feel stronger and more powerful, which improves how you think of your self-worth. You’ll feel proud of yourself and your achievements that come from exercise. Also, exercise will help you to feel more energized and ready to take on your day. Another great way exercise is useful to your mental health is by helping build your resistance. A lot of people cope with their challenges with things such as alcohol or drugs, but exercise helps to build your resistance and cope healthily. Regularly exercising can actually improve your immune system. Exercise has a helpful impact on sleep as well. Exercising on a regular basis decreases the amount of time it takes to fall asleep in addition to the amount of time you lay awake in bed. That said, it overall helps you to sleep better. Exercise can also help you to be less tired during the day. Exercising outdoors is especially beneficial because it allows your body to determine a cycle of sleeping and waking. As talked about before, exercise helps with anxiety, which therefore helps with sleep since anxiety can keep people up at night. The reason exercise has this effect on sleep is because exercise makes you tired, which fuels your sleep drive. This goes hand in hand with the COVID-19 pandemic. Since people weren’t able to get moving as much, so they didn’t sleep as much. A lot of these things have to do with your mood, which goes to show that exercise improves your mood. If you sleep more, you’ll be happier because you aren’t tired, which comes from exercise! Also, exercise increases serotonin and endorphins, as mentioned before, which then enhances your mood, and you’ll be happier. Finally, exercise has an influence on stress. The same way endorphins improve your mood, they decrease stress. Exercise also decreases the side effects of stress. Exercise very much acts the same way as meditation. When exercising, you’re typically only focusing on your body's movements and you’re aren’t concentrating on the things that might stress you out. To summarize, exercise affects your mental health in ways including relief for depression, anxiety, and ADHD in addition to improving self-esteem, building resistance healthily, allowing better sleep, enhancing mood, relieving stress, and more.
Detriments:
So far we’ve talked about how exercise is a great way to keep you and your body happy and healthy, however, there are some drawbacks to exercise. To start, stress fractures can come from overexercising or a specific exercise. A stress fracture is a tiny break in the bone that comes from repeating stress on the body. Stress fractures usually come when someone starts exercising in a new way or has increased the amount and intensity of exercise they do. They typically come from sports that involve running or a sport that involves repetitive movement. Exercise can cause pain and injuries in general as well, for example, a sprained ankle. In addition to injuries, exercise can also lead to addiction. People can actually become addicted to exercising the same way another person is addicted to alcohol. Those who are addicted to exercise, are more likely to have a second addiction to something like caffeine. This can also be referred to as compulsive exercise. Compulsive exercise has symptoms such as exercising in private, pushing yourself too far, using exercise as permission to eat or a way to get rid of calories, etc. The effects of compulsive or overexercising are bone density loss, which we know is bad since you want your bones to be dense, continuing muscle soreness, and the loss of menstrual cycle in women. Some other effects of this are increased injuries, chronic bone or joint pain, nonstop fatigue, and an increase in the frequency of illness and upper respiratory infections. In general, too much or too little exercise is bad for you, but the right amount leads to many healthy aspects. The right amount of exercise depends on the person but is recommended to get at least 10 minutes of exercise every day, whether it's a walk or going to the gym. When someone is overexercising, they might not be taking days to recover or they might be doing a clear unreasonable amount of exercise. Exercise can also have drawbacks depending on the person. Exercise can fuel an unhealthy obsession with losing weight, increase negative thoughts, and more. On the whole, exercise does have many benefits, but if you over-exercise or exercise obsessively, there are many unhealthy and bad effects on your body. A lot of this has to do with your intentions, so while exercise is good for you, your intentions and the purpose of your exercising can be very harmful.
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