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The word exercise can mean the following:
- A setting in action or practicing.
- Any activity designed to develop or hone a skill or ability.
- Physical exercise
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Physical exercise
Physical exercise is activity performed in order to develop or maintain physical fitness and overall health. Frequent and regular exercise is an important component in the prevention of some of the diseases of affluence such as cancer, heart disease, diabetes and obesity.
Exercises are generally grouped into three types depending on the overall effect they have on the human body:
- Flexibility exercises such as stretching improve the range of motion of muscles and joints.
- Aerobic exercises such as walking and running focus on increasing cardiovascular endurance.
- Anaerobic exercises such as weightlifting increase short-term muscle strength.
Exercise can be an important part of physical therapy, weight loss or sports performance.
Proper nutrition is as important to health as exercise. When exercising it becomes even more important to have good diet to ensure the body has the correct ratio of macronutrients whilst providing ample micronutrients, this is to aid the body with the recovery process following strenuous exercise.
"Exercise bulimia" is a disorder in which too much food energy is purged from the body through exercising.
It should be noted that Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness can occur after any kind of exercise, particularly if the body is in an unconditioned state relative to that exercise.
Exercise benefits
Frequent and regular exercise has been shown to help prevent or to improve major illnesses such as high blood pressure, obesity, heart disease, diabetes, insomnia, cancer 1 and depression, among others. Exercise can also increase energy and raise your threshold for pain. However, there is conflicting evidence as to whether vigorous exercise (say more than 70% of VO2 max) is more (or perhaps even, less) beneficial than moderate exercise (40 to 70% of VO2 max).
Common myths
Many common myths have arisen surrounding exercise, some of which have a basis in reality, and some which are completely false.
- Spot reduction.
It is a common belief that training a particular body part will preferentially shed the fat on that part; for example, that doing sit-ups is the most direct way to reduce subcutaneous belly fat. This is false. Most of the energy derived from fat gets to the muscle through the bloodstream and reduces stored fat in the entire body. Fat is reduced in a pattern determined mostly by genetics. Sit-ups may improve the size and shape of core muscles and may reduce the unsightly appearance of belly fat, but the belly fat will often be the last fat removed from the body.
- Only overweight people need a physical before beginning an exercise program.
Absolutely false. Only a physician can determine your ability to engage in an exercise program. Apparently healthy people can still have unknown medical conditions, such as a heart murmur, that can cause severe injury or death not only to themselves, but also to others that are dependent upon them, such as someone they are spotting.
- Muscle tissue will turn into fat once a person stops exercising.
False. Fat tissue and muscle tissue are fundamentally different. However, the more common expression of this myth "muscle will turn to fat" has a grain of truth. Although a muscle cell will not become a fat cell, the material that makes up muscle can in fact turn to fat. The catabolism of muscle fibers releases protein, which can turn to glucose that can be burned as fuel, and excesses of which can be stored as fat. Moreover, the composition of a body part can change toward less muscle and more fat, so that a cross-section of the upper-arm for example, will have a greater area corresponding to fat and a smaller area corresponding to muscle.
Too much exercise
Doing too much exercise can sometimes be harmful. The body needs time to rest, which is why most health officials say one should exercise every other day or 3 times a week. Without proper rest the chance of strokes or other circulation problems is increased, and muscle will develop slower.
Over-exercising does more harm than good. Performance is lost over-exercising, although the levels required to reach this are phenomenal (many hours every day of the week). For many activities, especially running, there are also significant injuries that occur with poorly regimented exercise schedules.
In addition, a relatively recently discovered phenomenon is that of Exercise hypertension, where the body's blood pressure spikes during intense exercise.
List of activities used as physical exercises
- aerobics
- calisthenics
- cycling
- dancing
- martial arts
- pilates
- rowing
- running
- sexercises
- sport
- stretching
- strip dance
- swimming
- walking
- warming up
- weight training
- yoga
List of classes of physical exercise
- Aerobic exercise
- Anaerobic exercise
- Endurance exercise
- High-density exercise
- High-intensity interval training (HIIT)
- Resistance training
Some activities can fall into more than one class of exercise. For instance: cycling can be used for endurance or high-intensity interval training; weightlifting is resistance training and can be high-density exercise with certain workout designs.
Breathing
Active exhalation during physical exercise helps the body to increase its maximum lung capacity, and oxygen uptake. This results in greater cardiac efficiency, since the heart has to do less work to oxygenate the muscles, and there is also increased muscular efficiency through greater blood flow. Consciously breathing deeply during aerobic exercise helps this development of the heart lung efficiency.
During breathing, males mostly use the intercostal muscles in the rib cage, females mostly use abdominal muscles. In strenuous exercise, it is likely that these differences diminish.
See also
External links
- Exercise Adherence
- Promoting Physical Activity and Exercise among Children
- Exercise Advice Fitness & Exercise Advice.
- Aerobics and Fitness Daily - fitness/exercise blog