Bottom Line Up Front: You don’t even need to exercise vigorously every day to be healthy – you just need to have a very deliberate, well-informed plan that covers all 7 days of the week. "Exercise" will look different for every person depending on your age and where you are at in your physical health journey - we will discuss further towards the end of the article what exercise should look like for you.
The conglomeration of recent decades of physical health and sports science studies have proven that you don’t need to spend 3 hours a day exercising to be healthy, and you don’t even need to exercise every day to be healthy. You simply need to come up with a 7-day plan that you can implement to get you through the entire week so that you know in advance what you are actually going to do. This is to ensure that you have a means by which to hold yourself accountable, and having a plan allows you to enforce that you actually exercise regularly!
Now, let’s look at the Top 5 reasons why exercising regularly will improve your life and improve the world around you, and then we’ll talk about how you can get after it!
1. You’ll Live Longer
That’s right; studies have proven that people who exercise daily tend to live several years and often multiple decades longer than people who don’t. The benefits of daily exercise allow the organs in your body to remain in top shape and performance, thus allowing them to perform optimally in combating a myriad of diseases and illnesses, even many forms of cancer. Exercise also actively works to prevent many conditions such as heart disease and diabetes by maintaining positive cardiovascular activity.
2. You’ll Feel Better Each and Every Day
This could honestly be the best reason. Even exercising moderately for just 15 minutes a day will make you feel way better than not exercising at all. Exercising regularly can cause your endorphin levels to be higher and can also cause your brain to release higher levels of dopamine into your nervous system. These are the natural chemicals in your body that create feelings of pleasure and reward and regulate your general level of enthusiasm and motivation in life. This is why exercise naturally can help you fight and overcome depression and anxiety, and feel generally better.
3. You Won’t Need As Much Sleep
Plain and simple. Studies have shown that people who are more physically fit may need as much as 1 to 2 hours less sleep every night than those who are not, in order to feel good throughout the day. See here 5 Reasons Why Resting is Important for Better Athletic Performance.
4. You Will Enable Your Weight Loss and Body Figure Goals
Exercise activates many additional glands and strong emotions in your body, causing your system to release adrenaline, which will increase your heart rate, muscle strength, blood pressure and metabolism – leading to an even bigger boost in the calories you will burn.
5. Your Brain Health Will Be Better
Regular exercise helps reduce the risk of stroke and is proven to help stave off Alzheimer’s and dementia. Exercise causes a healthy growth environment in the brain, leading to healthier brain cells, positive blood vessel growth, and positive brain cell survival and growth.
Something to meditate on: In what ways might a healthier, longer-living, better-feeling, better-functioning YOU be able to positively impact the world and people around you?
Weekly exercise plans will look different for every individual. This is why we highly recommend studying up on different types of exercise plans, based on your goals, before you build a plan – and also consulting with your physician before starting an exercise regime for the first time.
Here is a good universal plan if you are new to this arena: exercise significantly 4 or 5 days a week and include about 2 days of active recovery in your plan every week. Active recovery involves remaining physically active, but with limited intensity so as to allow all of your muscle groups time to rebuild and recover – this will help you avoid injury and burnout.
Active recovery may look something like a long walk, a light jog, a bike ride, doing some yardwork outside or something along those lines – just don’t sit on the couch all day on your recovery day; that’s the point we are trying to get at here. Sitting around and being overly lazy on recovery day causes lactic acid to build up in your muscles, which will impede in the recovery process and cause you to feel sore and cramp. Be sure to stretch on recovery days as well.
What is sufficient daily exercise will look different for you depending on your age and where you are at in your physical health journey. It may be a 25 minute fast-walk. It may be 2 hours in the gym doing a high intensity interval training (HIIT) workout. It may be 45 minutes of swimming. Figure out where your starting point is and go from there.
If you need some basic planning methodology as you embark on your journey of creating a daily exercise routine, check out one of our related articles: Building a Strategy and Support System: The Ultimate Guide to Conquering Every Single One of Your Health and Fitness Goals!
Give Yourself The Tools You Need to Succeed!
We definitely recommend heading over to our online store – which is a one-stop shop for many of your basic aids to bolster any exercise plan you choose: compression gear, recovery & pain relief equipment, resistance training gear, muscle massage balls and massage sticks. Plus, we offer a 100% satisfaction guarantee and no-hassle return policy; if you end up with something that doesn’t work for you, just send it back for a full refund!