First of all exercise makes your heart “lovely” in its efficacy fulfilling its functions. It works hard, pumping blood in every second. When you exercise, you make your heart pump faster, then you breath faster to take in more oxygen. This makes your heart muscles more stronger and gain more proficiency in delivering oxygen to all parts of the body while it also keeps the blood vessels a “smooth passage”.
Exercise keeps your muscles toned and strong. Using your muscles to do powerful things make them stronger. Compare it to a football team – who makes the team stronger by daily warm up practice. Exercise just does the same. Having strong mucles got its role in keeping the body fit. Keeping yourself balance is another important aspect an exercise can give. You get calories from the food you eat. You need calories to function and do all things a man should do.If you eat enough to meet that need, your body weight will stay about the same. If you eat more calories than your body needs, it may be stored as excess fat that is why an exercise takes its scene to do the balance. Perfectly balance body is required for being fit.Here’s a summary of the study: sixty-four people, either overweight or obese and with an average age of 67, participated over a four-month period. Some of the subjects started an exercise routine, some started a diet; some did both. The exercisers either rode a stationary bike or a treadmill, or they walked. The dieters cut calories to achieve a 10 percent weight loss.
The upshot? The exercisers burned more calories during exertion by the experiment’s end — in other words, their exercise became more efficient. The exercisers drew more on fat stores for energy than the dieters did and in fact, when the dieters lost weight, they lost muscle mass. The subjects who combined dieting with exercise nearly eliminated the loss of muscle tissue, burning fat instead.
One of the study directors, Brad H. Goodpaster, summed up the results: “The take-home message is that, even among older people and during a fairly short period of time, exercise produces metabolic changes that require the expenditure of fewer calories during physical activity. Exercise also allowed older people to more preferentially burn fat, which may be healthier metabolically.”
How exciting! But really, where have Dr. Goodpaster and the various media moguls who printed the study results been hiding? In a cave? Even the average 10-year-old knows that exercise leads to fat loss, that once you start exercising, it gets easier — and that exercise and diet combined give the best results. So the great advancement in this study is that now we know the same physiological laws apply to overweight people and older people as well. Wow! This kind of insight must be worth millions!
Why do studies like this one get funded? Why does the media bother reporting the results? Why are we stuck with ever-rising health-care costs? And whose tax dollars are funding such revolutionary endeavors?
The United States spends about $95 billion a year on medical research. It’s bad enough that, according to The Journal of the American Medical Association, industry sponsors 65 percent of that research, mostly to prove that their products work. But think much of that $95 billion is wasted on biased research and/or meaningless studies like this one — studies that cost plenty but that tell us nothing new or useful. It’s enough to make you clutch your wallet in self-defense.
An Associated Press news release from 2005, commenting on the state of medical research in the US (as reported in a special issue of JAMA), said, “What emerges from the issue is a picture of an amorphous, mostly profit-driven system, where industry research focuses on existing drugs and lets discovery-stage research lag behind.”
But there is a silver lining in the current study — we have yet one more reminder to exercise daily, no matter how old or chubby we are. And we have yet one more assurance from medical gurus who publish in esteemed medical journals that doing so actually will enhance our level of fitness — in case we didn’t believe the zillions of previous studies that already have attested to these facts.
Have you made a New Year’s resolution to get more exercise? Whether to improve your cardiovascular health or to help with weight control, exercise is a great plan. And now there is evidence that physical exercise can also perk up our brains.
This shouldn’t be a surprise. If exercise is healthy for our hearts and lungs, then why not for our brains? And if exercise can improve brain function, then it may also be beneficial for mood, cognition, and overall mental performance.
Research studies have shown that moderately intense physical activity, and especially aerobic exercise like brisk walking and running, can lead to improvements in cognitive functions like attention, reasoning, and decision making. Experiments have compared groups of people who exercised regularly with others who did not. The improvements in brain function were most dramatic in older adults, but all ages appeared to benefit from increased physical exercise.
One recent analysis looked at the combined results of 18 different studies of the possible cognitive effects of fitness training in older adults. Although the results showed gains in all types of cognitive activity among the fitness-training groups, the greatest advances were found in the exercisers’ executive functioning, which controls higher-level decision making skills like planning, scheduling, multi-tasking, and dealing with ambiguity.
We need executive functioning to be able to select appropriate social behaviors and inhibit inappropriate actions. Other types of cognitive activity include reaction time, the ability to remember or interpret visual information, and lower-level decisionmaking.
Surveys also show that people who are physically active throughout their lives are less likely to experience cognitive decline later in life. And those who exercise regularly are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
Some clues may explain how physical activity can help the cognitive functioning of our brains. It has been shown, for example, that fitness training can improve blood flow in the brain and increase the number of capillaries carrying the blood.
Exercise also increases levels of neurochemicals that stimulate the interconnections among neurons. And exercise may increase the size of some areas of the brain or, at least, slow their rate of decrease as we age. Many of these changes are most prominent in the brain’s frontal cortex, the area most important for executive functioning.
So remember, even modest increases in physical activity can be beneficial for your brain and for the important things that organ does for you. How much exercise is enough?
That depends on your age and health, but vigorous walking for 20 to 30 minutes a few days a week is a good start. Be sure to check with your health care provider before starting a new, rigorous exercise program.
