Exercising daily has so many health benefits besides the obvious of increasing your physical fitness. Daily exercise will help you to manage your weight, prevent heart disease, strengthen your heart and lungs, manage stress, help with depression and anxiety as well as sleep. "The 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans recommends that healthy adults get a minimum of 2-1/2 hours per week of moderate-intensity aerobic activity", says the Harvard School of Public Health. The question being, is it better to exercise two or three times a week for an hour or five to six days a week for less time?
These days it is so hard for people to squeeze in workouts with the chaos of life. It can be hard to find a full hour in a day to dedicate to working out and physical fitness. Not only may it be easier to get a thirty minute workout in daily there are many other benefits to having a daily workout routine.
- When you workout daily you are boosting your metabolism at least once in the day. Your metabolism will continue to fire throughout the day, therefore you will burn more calories than you would otherwise.
- With the modern lifestyle people are sitting a good portion of the day either in a car, at a desk or on a couch. The human body is meant to move. So working out daily will get the joints moving, the muscles firing and help your body to feel good and prevent injury or help current injuries you may have.
- Working out will help you focus on you for a short time. All throughout the day most people are busy thinking about work, kids, plans and all the "to do's" they have. It is a great time to be present and focus on the needs of the body.
- If you had a stressful day and your blood pressure is up exercise is the answer! It will lower your blood pressure and get your stress out.
- Exercise increases your endorphins and gives your body a "boost" of happiness. This will spill over into all other aspects of your life.
- You don't want to over training. You want to make sure when you do resistant training not train the same body part to vigorously on back to back days. Your muscles need time to rest and recover
- Cardiovascular exercise can be done daily and if you do resistance training do different muscle groups on different days.
- Always stretch with active and dynamic stretching for warm ups and static stretching at the end of your workout to help keep your body loose and avoid injuries.
- When you are working out daily your nutritional intake is critical. Your body needs the proper fuel to help in the repair and recovery phases.
By following these basic guidelines exercising daily will have far greater benefits than and every other day workout routine. Keep the body moving and get your heart rate up everyday and get out of breath. Your mind and body will thank you.
Jessica Unbewust
co-owner
ferrum fitness