Fitness refers to an overall state of physical health and well-being, attained through regular physical exercise and appropriate nutrition. Fitness encompasses cardiovascular endurance, muscular strength and flexibility physiologically.
Making fitness part of your everyday is an effective way to stay in shape. Start taking the stairs instead of the elevator or parking further away to increase walking time.
Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercise (also referred to as cardiovascular or endurance exercise) raises your heart rate while simultaneously making your lungs work harder to move oxygenated blood around the body. Aerobic activities include walking, jogging or swimming and can help burn significant calories.
Know you’re exercising at a moderate intensity if you can converse, yet not sing, during your workout. Never gasping for air; feel like you are working but not too much that it becomes uncomfortable.
Aerobic exercise lowers your risk for coronary artery disease by strengthening and improving the performance of your heart, increasing its ability to pump blood. Furthermore, exercise can also help manage your blood pressure and cholesterol levels and enhance overall health by increasing high-density lipoprotein (“good”) cholesterol while simultaneously decreasing low-density lipoprotein (“bad”). Exercise may also reduce pain in people suffering from arthritis and cancer and relieve related symptoms as well as decreasing anxiety and depression levels.
Muscle Strengthening
Muscle-strengthening exercises – which typically include lifting weights or other resistance — have numerous health benefits, from improving bone density to helping prevent falls and decreasing injuries and muscle pain such as backaches.
Experts advise doing muscle strengthening exercises twice or three times each week that target each major muscle, be it at home, in a gym or using equipment like strength bands.
As your body adjusts to exercise, start slowly by increasing weight or resistance gradually over time. Aim for eight-12 repetitions (reps) per exercise with short rest intervals in between sets.
Future research should aim at developing better measures of muscle-strengthening activity suitable for public health surveillance purposes, analyzing a broader array of potential correlates for such exercise and identifying factors that may help overcome barriers to engaging in muscle strengthening activities among population sub-groups that are at greater risk for lower levels of such activities.
Flexibility
Flexibility refers to your joints’ ability to move through a full range of motion without pain, which allows your muscles and tendons to function optimally and reduces muscle fatigue, injury and backache risks. Impaired flexibility increases muscle fatigue risk as well as backache risks – this may cause issues with posture and balance as well. Stretching is one way of improving flexibility by lengthening tight muscles and tendons through stretching exercises.
Since flexibility tests vary from joint to joint, it can be more challenging than other fitness measurements to establish strong links between their results and health outcomes; such as for aerobic capacity, muscular endurance or strength tests. Some studies have established relationships between flexibility tests and health outcomes (such as lower back pain or ability to perform sports activities), and flexible results – but other associations between flexibility tests and health outcomes remain unknown.
Balance
Balance refers to our ability to control our center of gravity. This requires input from various systems such as our eyes (visual system), inner ears and pressure receptors located throughout our joints and muscles (proprioceptive system).
Working on your balance can help enhance agility by speeding up reaction times. Furthermore, improving posture through practice and physical therapy sessions will prevent injuries during exercise and everyday life, protecting you from injuries related to falling down and improving reaction times.
Balance drills have proven beneficial for athletes in terms of running form and injury recovery times; those engaging in balance training have better running forms with reduced back and knee problems as well as faster recoveries times following sports injuries. You can easily incorporate balance training into your workout by using an exercise ball, or performing yoga poses such as Tree Pose or Crane Pose.
Strengthen Your Mind
Just as regular physical workouts help build strong bodies, mental challenges can strengthen both bodies and minds alike. By maintaining mental fitness through mental exercises you can preserve mental agility and memory retention.
Mind fitness can be measured through activities like remembering a sequence of numbers without repeating them, or working out an arithmetic problem without using a calculator, for instance. Other activities, like learning a foreign language or taking an online cognitive exercise program may also improve thinking capabilities.
Physical activity not only supports cardiovascular health and lowers blood pressure and cholesterol levels, but it can also benefit brain health. Research shows that moderate-intensity exercises such as walking can stimulate new brain cells to increase thinking skills as we age.
