Body Hacking — Abandoned Your New Year Resolution Yet? Here are 7 Tips for Staying Active
We all know that exercising is good for us, but can we explain how? Well, exercise:
- Promotes physical health: Being active builds up our muscles, injects oxygen and nutrients into our tissues, and boosts the efficiency of our cardiovascular system, Mayo Clinic suggests. Working out also “keeps your blood flowing smoothly, which decreases your risk of cardiovascular diseases.” For those who are interested in weight control, regular physical activities prevent excess weight gain and help maintain weight loss.
- Enhances brain health: “As your heart rate increases during exercise, blood flow to the brain increases. As blood flow increases, your brain is exposed to more oxygen and nutrients”. By inducing the release of beneficial proteins in the brain, physical activities also keep brain cells healthy and promote the growth of new neurons, writers Elizabeth A. Weaver II and Hilary H. Doyle explain. Here’s an engaging talk by neuroscientist Wendy Suzuki about “The brain-changing benefits of exercise” ▶️.
- Improves your mood and mental health: When we exercise, feel-good chemicals such as dopamine and endorphins are released in our brain while chemicals that make us stressed and anxious are purged, helping us regulate our moods and enhance our mental health, Weaver and Doyle note.
- Helps us sleep better: Regular exercise has been shown to energize us during the day and aid our sleep at night, which in turn improves our body and brain functions.
- Keeps you young: Based on research by Journal of Applied Physiology, muscles of lifelong exercisers over 50 are similar to those in their 20s and they have higher aerobic capabilities compared to non-exercisers their age.
- Boosts your social and sexual life: Team sports are fun to enjoy with friends and family. Keeping active also enhances arousal in women and reduce erectile dysfunction in men, Mayo Clinic says.
On the flip side, research shows that people who don’t move much and look at the screen all the time are more likely to be stressed, depressed and lonely. Lack of exercise is also a major cause of chronic diseases, accounting for, for example, 8.3% of deaths in non-disabled adults 25 or older in the U.S..
So are you motivated to move now? Here are 7 tips for staying active:
- “Get at least 150 minutes of moderate aerobic activity or 75 minutes of vigorous aerobic activity a week, or a combination of moderate and vigorous activity,” Mayo Clinic advises. I personally exercise 20 minutes per day, then try (“try” is the operative term here) to do outdoor activities such as hiking or swimming once or twice a week.
- Combine different types of workout to train aerobic (e.g., dancing), balance (e.g., surfing), durability (e.g., rowing), flexibility (e.g., yoga), and strength (e.g., weightlifting). Here are the health benefits of different kinds of physical activities.
- Find activities that you enjoy so you will stick to them. They can be team sports, dancing, yoga, walking, biking, swimming, climbing, etc.
- Any physical activity counts. Even lighter movements for a short time such as walking or stretching are beneficial to your health. Personally I take the stairs instead of the escalators whenever I can. I also like to walk to or from the restaurant — it boosts both appetite and digestion. Doing chores is also a good way to stay active while getting things done. See below for a table of “invisible exercises”.
- Go to nature. People who spend more time in greenery are found to have lower stress hormone cortisol, heart rate, blood pressure, and cholesterol. They also have reduced risk of coronary heart disease, type II diabetes, cardiovascular mortality, etc., according to a new meta-analysis in the journal Environmental Research (n=143)
- Try interval training. Research shows that interval training gives aging muscles the best results at the cellular level. “Among the younger subjects who went through interval training, the activity levels had changed in 274 genes, compared with 170 genes for those who exercised more moderately and 74 for the weight lifters. Among the older cohort, almost 400 genes were working differently now, compared with 33 for the weight lifters and only 19 for the moderate exercisers,” based on a study by Cell Metabolism.
- Not the best way to lose weight. While working out is a great way to keep fit, it is not an ideal way ▶️ to lose weight since exercise only accounts for 10–30% of energy consumption. That said, because exercise wakes up your mind and releases endorphin and other motivational chemicals, it improves your decision-making and willpower, helping you make better lifestyle choices to stay healthy.
Read about other body hacking articles:
Do you have any suggestions, doubts, hypothesis or experience for this topic? Please comment below 👇!
