One simple question, if I’m on a healthy balanced diet, why should I exercise?
Benefits of exercise go far beyond losing, gaining or maintaining weight. Exercise has a significant effect on your overall well being both physically and mentally., benefits include:
- Maintenance and improvement of strength
- Burns fat
- Increases metabolic rate
- Increases flexibility
- Increases speed
- Enhanced cardiovascular efficiency
- Improves muscle tone, body shape and posture
- Improves sleep
- Reduces stress
- Makes bones, muscles and tendons stronger and makes joints more stable.
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Benefits of regular aerobic exercise on the heart and lungs include.
Improved efficiency of the heart so it beats more strongly and can pump more blood with each stroke(stroke volume).
Reduced resting heart rate and improved heart efficiency when exercising.
An increase in heart size and reduction of the time taken to return to normal resting heart rate can also occur.
Physiologically the following also occurs.
Heart rate increases in direct proportion to oxygen consumption and increases with exercise intensity until maximum heart rate is achieved.
Stroke volume is the amount of blood ejected from the left ventricle with each beat of the heart and this increases with exercise.
Normally it is 70mls/beat at rest progressing to 140ml/beat with maximum exercise.
Cardiac output is a product of heart rate and stroke volume at rest it is normally 5 l/min while exercising maximally it can reach 25l/min.
Generally exercising the body improves every area of your health, there is no such thing as ‘too old’ or ‘too overweight’, everyone can benefit from increased activity.
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