Ten Benefits of Exercise

Part of our daily list of priorities should be to take care of our bodies. With fast food, pre-packaged snacks and frozen dinners there days, it is ever challenging to keep ourselves phisically healthy. While I am not an advocate for teenage dieting, I do think that we should be wise in what and how much we choose to eat. Making sure to get those calories you consume burned, and working to keep your body in shape is also essential for good health. Here are a few reasons why. Get ready for a healthy dose of motavation!

1. When you force your heart to work faster than it's usual pace, as you do while exercising, it has to find ways to pump extra blood through your vessles to carry the extra oxygen needed to cater to the strain. This means it creates new vessles for your blood to travel to, greatly preventing heart attacks and other respitory problems. Since the heart is the organ that makes all the rest work, it certainly seems wise to try to prepare it for unexpected bumps in the road.

2. Exercising strengthens your bones by the osteoclast and osteoblast cells which work to build up the areas that have the most stress put upon them. A German orthopedic surgeon by the name of Julius Wolff constructed a law that describes the result of exercise on bones. It states that bones adjust their shapes to the physical stress put upon them. This means that if you expose your bones to stress by doing things like biking, running, or other physical exercise, they will build themselves up accordingly to have the ability to withstand weight baring activity.

3. Endurance plays a large part in our lives. For my dad, it means being able to lift heavy cases of inventory without stopping for a long period of time at work. For my little sister, it means being able to climb up and down things continually - about every hour of her waking moment. :) When you exercise consistently, and push yourself to work longer when you feel the work out isn't hard enough, your body builds endurance to cater to the hard working parts of the body it is pushing. This not only makes your daily life easier, but helps your body work more efficiently as well.

4. Calories are anything you eat, whether stored or not. Excercising burns these into energy, which rids us of uneeded baggage. :-)

5. Even after you exercise, your body continues to burn calories. This makes you feel as if you have more energy. My mom works out to excercise videos early in the mornings, and she says it helps her feel ready for the day. I jog on the tredmill in the afternoons, which refreshes me with energy at the time of day I need it most.

6. As one of my former science books said, "Muscles are machines which perform more efficiently when in use." When you engage in physical exercise, you shrink fat cells and reveal what you have of muscle. While cardiovascular exercise doesn't build as much muscle like weight training would, it does train and build them according to the stress you expose them to. When you have good muscle tone, a state of slight tension in relaxed muscle, it helps you to have good posture - an important element in not only a healthy back, but of proper appearence as well.

7. Exercising strengthens your body and helps it to guard it against sicknesses. Thus, it can save your life!

8. Aerobic excercise increases the number of red blood cells in our body, the cells that carry oxygen, hence increasing our oxygen consumption.e all love to breathe, right?

9. When you exercise, you increase the rate of which you burn energy, or in other words, boost your metabolism. This is very healthy because it keeps things running inside you.

10. Lastly, excercising prevents many diseases. Heart disease, type two diabites and osteoporosis, to name a few. Did you know that all of these have their risks slashed greatly when you consistently exercise? Don't forget obesity; remember those fat cells we shrank. No, you do not have to be as skinny as a toothpick, but there are many benefits to not being extremely overweight, either.

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All in all, exercising is extremely good for our bodies. We were created to move! Let's remember that the earlier we start conciensely making good health choices, the easier it will be to stick to them for the rest of our lives. Let's take care of our "temples" not only in a spiritual way, but phiscally as well!