The Surprising Benefits of Regular Exercise

It can be hard to fit working out and maintaining fitness goals into your schedule. Here are some of our thoughts on the benefits of regular exercise and why you should try to make it a priority.

In other posts, we’ve talked about how critical your diet is to your health, but we haven’t touched on one of the other sides of health; fitness and the benefits of regular exercise. In today’s world, motion is hard to find. Between television, social media, and any desk job, most people sit for most of the day. And everything is so busy and so fast that making the time to regularly exercise after a long day seems impossible. But it is critical to make that time. The human body is meant to move, and major issues can develop without enough activity.

However, many of the issues involving the lack of physical activity are not well known to most people. A big reason for this is that many mainstream media outlets primarily only promote one side of the fitness scale. Most people think the only benefits of regular exercise are losing weight and looking more muscular. While losing weight is something physical activity can help with, thinking that working out only affects how you look can make it feel like working out is just for external validation. Doing something just because of external validation changes your mentality and can destroy your motivation and mental and physical health in the long run.

Fitness goes back to our roots

The earliest days of humanity consisted of hunting, gathering, and farming. While we’re not saying they didn’t rest, most led very different lives than most people of today. For example, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that the average workday in the United States is about eight hours. For many jobs, those eight hours are spent sitting before a computer. Then, at the end of the day, most medical experts recommend that you get seven to nine hours of sleep per night. Counting just those two non-negotiable activities, that’s 15 to 17 hours of your day when moving around isn’t feasible.

We all know that everyone should be more active, but here are some of the benefits you can gain from regular exercise:

Multiple organizations, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the Mayo Clinic, MedlinePlus, and more all agree on the effects that working out and staying physically active have on your body.

Improving mental health

Though working out focuses on physical movement, it also can help your mental health. Most resources mention the chemical shift that happens when you work out. Your brain releases more endorphins and can become more sensitive to certain hormones like serotonin. This increase in chemical activity can help you feel more relaxed and less prone to anxiety and depression. Along with this, regular exercise benefits you by potentially reducing your stress levels. This is because exerting yourself can relieve pent-up tension in a healthy and non-destructive manner. Just be careful not to use working out as your only coping mechanism. Like with anything else, too much can become a bad thing.

Prevent diseases and help manage chronic conditions

Another benefit of regular exercise is that it also helps to prevent various diseases and disorders. Most resources note that routine physical activity results in lower blood pressure and cholesterol, which can help prevent heart disease, type 2 diabetes, strokes, and even many types of cancer. Along with this, the strength you develop from working out can mitigate the symptoms of more common illnesses like colds and the flu.

Mobility

Strength is not just a matter of being able to move more weight. Full-body fitness also involves balance and coordination. Somewhat ironically, working out builds muscle by breaking the tissue down and then allowing your body to repair the damage. The strength you build while working out helps you develop better balance and coordination, which can help prevent falls. And if you do fall, your body will have the strength to prevent or recover more quickly from injuries. Maintaining mobility is especially important as you age and your body starts breaking down at every turn. It’s like changing the oil in a car or doing weekly chores. If you keep up with mundane maintenance, you will limit the number and severity of breakdowns you encounter.

Managing weight

This is the obvious most discussed benefit of regular exercise. Staying fit can help with weight management, whether that be losing or gaining weight. The effort of working out burns calories, which can cause you to lose weight if you don’t eat enough calories to replace what you lose. Physical activity is often heralded as the only way to effectively impact your weight. However, your diet plays as much, if not more, of a factor in weight management and overall health. Based on our personal fitness journey experiences, we believe your diet should be one of the first places you look if weight management is something you are concerned about. It doesn’t even have to be something drastic, like not eating anything but leaves and fruit. By just removing certain bad foods, like some of the oils we talk about in our other post, Healthy Fats: Know the Best Options for Your Well-Being, and replacing them with better alternatives, you’ll most likely feel the differences in your overall health much sooner than you would if you just added a fitness routine to your day.

Our Experiences

Fitness is incredibly important to us at Glover Cottage Grove. My husband played multiple sports growing up, I was in the marching band, and we both grew up near mountains and farms. With all of this, it was as hard to find the time to sit down and take a rest then as it is to make the time for a full workout in between all of the adult responsibilities of today. The lack of movement found in most of adult American life is one of the major reasons we wanted out of the corporate 9–5 grind. It was driving us completely bananas to just sit in front of a screen All. Day. Long.

Every day, we agonized over not being able to fit a workout into the schedule. We just couldn’t figure out when we would find the time for it. We had to change our mindset in order to fit it onto our list. Taking the time to drive to a gym, do a full workout, and drive home was obviously out of the question. After that, we couldn’t afford a full home gym, nor did we even have the space for one.

The changes we made to feel more of the benefits of regular exercise

Time and equipment were our biggest obstacles to maintaining our fitness goals, so we had to shrink everything. As far as the equipment went, we researched exercises that used body weight or dumbbell weights. There are a few dumbbell options that are cheaper and easier to store than full weight racks. Regarding time, we realized that we didn’t have to do hours worth of working out. Fifteen to thirty minutes a day were all it would take to help us get our blood flowing and start seeing some of the benefits of regular exercise.

We compiled some workouts that target the entire body and incorporate the movements that we often perform while working on homestead projects; exercises like the farmer’s carry, squats, lunges, and pulling exercises like rows. Even something as simple as doing 50 push-ups, 50 squats, and 50 crunches a day can help you feel better physically, mentally, and emotionally.

The hardest thing to remember

This is something we still struggle with. To get the benefits of regular exercise, fitness has to be a constant priority. And that’s hard! It hurts to work out. There are a million other things to do. And the mentality in the United States has become that you can only prioritize keeping yourself healthy enough to go to work tomorrow. We work out because staying active helps us feel better both physically and mentally. We hope this article has helped you gain a new resolve to give your body the movement it needs.