Running for your health: the physical benefits of running
Concerned about his recent weight gain and his family’s health history, he has thought about dieting and exercising, but hasn’t had the time. You’ve heard that running is good for you, but are you going to address those issues on your doctor’s worry list?
These are the main physical benefits of running.
1. Cardiovascular health: Your cardiovascular system is made up of your heart, arteries that carry fresh, oxygenated blood and nutrients to your tissues, and veins that remove carbon dioxide and waste from your body.
Running has been shown to make the arteries more elastic, which lowers blood pressure. Lowering your blood pressure reduces your risk of stroke, heart attack, and other types of heart disease.
The physical aspects of running also strengthen your heart. This will help protect your heart from cardiovascular disease and will make everything you do, from walking up the stairs to shopping to playing with the kids, physically much easier.
2. Another important aspect of cardiovascular health is the lungs. Runners in general have much healthier lungs than people who don’t exercise.
Those healthy lungs means more oxygen to the blood and vital organs. You’ll also develop more capillaries, those tiny blood vessels that carry oxygen and nutrients to every cell in your body, which means physical activity won’t feel as hard.
3. weight control: People who engage in any type of physical activity find it much easier to control their weight than their sedentary counterparts.
The weight set is basically a balance between calories consumed and calories burned. Simply put, if you eat more calories than you burn, you’re going to gain weight. And if you burn more calories than you eat, you will lose weight. It’s as simple as that.
Since running is one of the best calorie-burning activities—it burns more calories per hour than just about anything except cross-country skiing, mixed martial arts, and synchronized swimming—it’s also one of the most effective ways to control your weight.
Plus, you don’t need any specialized equipment except a pair of shoes and you can do it pretty much anywhere.
Four. stronger bones: Osteoporosis is a bone-wearing disease as calcium is filtered out faster than it is replaced. There are many complex processes at work in this degenerative disease, but lack of physical activity has been a contributing factor.
As an impact sport, one might think that running might cause more bone problems than it solves, but the medical evidence paints a different picture. You see, the physical impact that running has on your body will cause your body to increase bone density to protect you.
Therefore, running can prevent and even reverse osteoporosis by avoiding unnecessary and painful breaks and preventing you from taking medication.
5. Diabetes: Type 2 diabetes, and its precursor condition, metabolic syndrome, cause many health problems in adults and, increasingly, in our youth. The body’s inability to control insulin and blood sugar levels leads to heart disease, circulatory problems, kidney failure, blindness, and premature death.
While diet has been shown to be a major factor in the development of diabetes, lack of physical activity is almost always a factor.
Running as part of a fitness regimen has been shown to prevent or even reverse this terrible disease. Running as little as 20 to 30 minutes a day, 3 times a week, can help keep your blood sugar and insulin levels in a healthy range.
6. longer life: Since running can prevent all of the above conditions, it should definitely be in your health management toolkit. Preventing any of these life-limiting conditions makes running a sensible option.
However, there is an even better reason: running increases the natural production of human growth hormone (HGH). Aging removes muscle mass and bone strength. HGH stimulates muscle production and strengthens our skeletal system.
And that will help you look and feel young and healthy.