"The Benefits Of Physical Exercise You May Know About And The Hidden Bonus Ones You Probably Don't!"

    
     Some of the more common benefits of physical exercise are well known to you already, as is probably the maxim "a healthy body means a healthy mind".

But did you know in addition to these, there are other, lesser known exercise benefits which are equally as valuable?

     Just before we get onto those, however, let's quickly recap on some of the more common benefits of physical exercise you'll already be familiar with.

 
Regular physical exercise helps to;
  • Reduce stress
  • Make you sleep more soundly
  • Strengthen and tone muscle
  • Increase heart and lung efficiency
  • Reduce the risk of heart disease and lung disease
  • Increase circulation
  • Reduce blood pressure
  • Reduce cholesterol

And of course exercise affects your brain positively too by stimulating growth of brain cells, so you can think more clearly and effectively.
    
     These points alone should be enough to inspire anybody to regularly exercise! But just in case they aren't, you're now about to discover some other, little-known benefits of physical exercise that may just tip the balance and get you firmly on that road to fitness.

Did you know that exercising can also help to;
 
  • Reduce symptoms of arthritis
     
  • Improve posture
  • Improve your skin quality and make it heal better
  • Slow down or prevent osteoporosis and many other debilitating diseases
  • Reduce depression
  • Reduce the likelihood of developing cancers such as colon and skin cancer

There are so many positives and you can benefit from all of them ,plus many, many more  simply by exercising regularly!

Now, there's 1 popular misconception about how you gain the benefits of physical exercise that needs to be addressed, and that is...

"the amount of exercise you actually need"


     You may well be of the opinion that you need to work out for hours each week at the gym or have to go running for at least an hour twice a week for example.
 
     Obviously you can and if you do you'll of course get fitter quicker. Or you can look at some of the best elliptical machines on the market and do your running in teh comforto of your own home.

     But if either of these options aren't for you that's fine, because the key to gaining the benefits of physical exercise is in doing whatever you do regularly. It's about quantity and not necessarily about intensity. Just so long as you do what you do with consistency and regularity, you will benefit.
 
     Now, the final thing to cover off here is that there are both direct benefits of doing physical exercise and indirect benefits of doing physical exercise. We have just covered a selection of the direct benefits and now we'll cover the indirect ones.

     We've already seen that 2 direct benefits are sleeping better and improving brain function. What you'll also find, however, is that you will need less sleep, which means you can get up earlier. Doing this gives you extra time to get more things done - and we all know how valuable time is.

You can see how this is all starting to fit together.

     But not only do you have more time to do extra things, you're actually doing more with increased brain power. So the quality of the extra things you do improves as a result too!

You then get into a positive feeling cycle because;

    • you feel great from exercising anyway
    • you feel great because you need less sleep and so have more time each day
    • you feel great because you're doing more
    • you feel great because you can achieve your goals more quickly by doing more each day and
    • you feel great because, through achieving your goals more quickly, your standard of life increases more quickly and you can move more rapidly to to achieving the life you truly desire

So you see, there are many benefits of physical exercise to be gained and some that you probably hadn't even dreamed of!