Exercise can make you feel happier
Exercise has been shown to improve your mood and decrease feelings of depression, anxiety, and stress. It produces changes in the parts of the brain that regulate stress and anxiety. It can also increase brain sensitivity to the hormones serotonin and norepinephrine, which relieve feelings of depression.
Additionally, exercise can increase the production of endorphins, which are known to help produce positive feelings and reduce the perception of pain.
Interestingly, it doesn’t matter how intense your workout is. It seems that exercise can benefit your mood no matter the intensity of the physical activity.
Exercise is good for your muscles and bones
Exercise plays a vital role in building and maintaining strong muscles and bones.
Activities like weightlifting can stimulate muscle building when paired with adequate protein intake.
This is because exercise helps release hormones that promote your muscles’ ability to absorb amino acids. This helps them grow and reduces their breakdown.
As people age, they tend to lose muscle mass and function, which can lead to an increased risk of injury. Practicing regular physical activity is essential to reducing muscle loss and maintaining strength as you age.
Exercise also helps build bone density when you’re younger, in addition to helping prevent osteoporosis later in life.
Exercise can help skin health
Your skin can be affected by the amount of oxidative stress in your body.
Oxidative stress occurs when the body’s antioxidant defenses cannot completely repair the cell damage caused by compounds known as free radicals. This can damage the structure of the cells and negatively impact your skin.
Even though intense and exhaustive physical activity can contribute to oxidative damage, regular moderate exercise can actually increase your body’s production of natural antioxidants, which help protect cells.
In the same way, exercise can stimulate blood flow and induce skin cell adaptations that can help delay the appearance of skin aging (36Trusted Source).
Exercise can help your brain health and memory
Exercise can improve brain function and protect memory and thinking skills.
To begin with, it increases your heart rate, which promotes the flow of blood and oxygen to your brain. It can also stimulate the production of hormones that enhance the growth of brain cells.
Plus, the ability of exercise to prevent chronic disease can translate into benefits for your brain, since its function can be affected by these conditions.
Regular physical activity is especially important in older adults since aging — combined with oxidative stress and inflammation — promotes changes in brain structure and function.
8. Exercise can help with relaxation and sleep quality
Regular exercise can help you relax and sleep better.
With regard to sleep quality, the energy depletion (loss) that occurs during exercise stimulates restorative processes during sleep.
Moreover, the increase in body temperature that occurs during exercise is thought to improve sleep quality by helping body temperature drop during sleep.
Many studies on the effects of exercise on sleep have reached similar conclusions.
One review of six studies found that participating in an exercise training program helped improve self-reported sleep quality and reduced sleep latency, which is the amount of time it takes to fall asleep.
9. Exercise can reduce pain
Although chronic pain can be debilitating, exercise can actually help reduce it.
In fact, for many years, the recommendation for treating chronic pain was rest and inactivity. However, recent studies show that exercise helps relieve chronic pain.
In fact, one review of several studies found that exercise can help those with chronic pain reduce their pain and improve their quality of life.
Several studies also show that exercise can help control pain associated with various health conditions, including chronic low back pain, fibromyalgia, and chronic soft tissue shoulder disorder, to name a few.
Additionally, physical activity can also raise pain tolerance and decrease pain perception.
10. Exercise can promote a better sex life
Exercise has been proven to boost sex drive.
Engaging in regular exercise can strengthen the heart, improve blood circulation, tone muscles, and enhance flexibility, all of which can improve your sex life.
Physical activity can also improve sexual performance and sexual pleasure while increasing the frequency of sexual activity.
