As a trainer and dietician I can say from experience that a large number of people, if not most, start exercising with the goal of losing weight. However, we have tons of literature telling us that the benefits go beyond fat loss.
In this article We explain five other reasons more interesting than this weight and fat loss to start training.
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Lower risk of metabolic diseases, osteoporosis and sarcopenia
Training, particularly strength training, is associated with higher levels of muscle and bone tissue. This in itself makes you face the day to day with greater safety and efficiency and messing up less, especially if we are talking about older people.
In addition, people with more muscle tissue have fewer hospital admissions, fewer surgical complications, and generally leave the hospital sooner.
In the elderly, greater muscle mass implies more autonomy and less risk of falls and if you fall, greater bone mineral density translates into less probability of breaking a bone.
However, on a metabolic level, training offers a better glucose metabolism, greater control of inflammation at the body level, better lipid profile and lower blood pressure.
Greater control of emotional hunger
Hunger is an innate drive that drives us to seek and eat food. This is the description of physiological hunger so so far so good. However, there is a related concept that is emotional hunger, that is, that hunger that we can feel not for physiological reasons but for psychological causes. Normally this emotional hunger is directly related to stress and anxiety.
Although physical exercise usually causes an increase in appetite on a physiological level, it also positively regulates the circuit of hormones and neurotransmitters of hunger, so It allows you to better manage emotional hunger.
More effective immune system
In the short term and after the first few times we practice physical exercise, there is a decrease in the effectiveness of our immune system and we must say so. A workout, especially if it is intense and vigorous, it will temporarily weaken our immune system and can make us more likely to get sick.
This is not bad news as it is a transient effect that will culminate in a stronger immune system that is less likely to become so weak the next time around during any given workout.
One of the most notable adaptations that our body makes to training is that of improve the efficiency of our neutrophilsa type of leukocytes in our blood that are responsible for fighting, among other things, infections.
Safer pregnancies, lower risk of gestational diabetes and better neuromotor development of the baby
Training during pregnancy not only benefits the mother but also the baby. From the mother’s point of view, training decreases the risk of complications, including gestational diabetes or hypertension. In these circumstances, pregnancies are usually safer and easier to manage medically.
From the baby’s point of view, the mother’s training causes the baby to develop less adiposity (fat tissue) both during pregnancy and after childbirth. What’s more, their neuromotor development will be more precocious.
Better stress and anxiety management
A person with stress and anxiety is likely to live with high levels of catecholamines or cortisol, among others, so training can fit within this physiological response that causes stress and anxiety: mobilization of energy flow, increased heart rate and muscle contraction.
In response to training we produce a series of hormones and neurotransmitters that can counteract, at least to a certain extent, the effects produced by the previous hormones that we have mentioned. We are referring in this case to endorphins, which are capable of reducing stress and anxiety levels significantly.
In this way, training can share some symptoms of stress and anxiety (increased heart rate, for example) but it is able to regulate them in a positive way.
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