Why Exercise? 3 Great Reasons to Stay Active

To clean house

We all know exercise is good for us, but now we know exercise cleans our muscles. Exercise removes worn-out proteins and prevents their accumulation to keep muscles healthy and functioning.

Exercise builds muscle which is important for maintaining and regulating metabolism and mobility. It also cleans muscles. Danish and Australian researchers have shown that a single intense 10-minute bike ride increases the activity of proteins that remove worn-out muscle protein allowing for the building of new proteins.

Before their research, the importance of cleaning up of worn-out muscle protein wasn’t understood. Professor Jorgen Wojtaszewski says,

“Basically, it explains part of the reason why physical activity is healthy. The beauty is that muscle use is what initiates the processes that keep muscles ‘up to date’, healthy and functional.”

Professor Jørgen Wojtaszewski, University of Copenhagen

Exercise is responsible for building new muscles and cleaning old muscle cells. Every time you exercise you clean house in your muscle cells.

Improve your memory

Worried because you can’t remember where you put your keys? Maybe consider increasing your exercise intensity. New research from the University of Geneva shows that as little as 15 minutes of high-intensity exercise improves memory and the ability to acquire new motor skills.

High-intensity exercise increases plasticity in the brain by increasing endocannabinoids. If you have ever experienced that feeling of well-being that comes during, or immediately after, an endurance workout you have felt the benefits of endocannabinoids.

Endocannabinoids are produced by the body during exercise.

“They circulate in the blood and easily cross the blood-brain barrier. They then bind to specialize cellular receptors and trigger this feeling of euphoria. In addition, these same molecules bind to receptors in the hippocampus, the main brain structure for memory processing,”

Kinga Igloi, lecturer in the laboratory of Professor Sophie Schwartz, at UNIGE Faculty of Medicine’s Department of Basic Neurosciences

Endocannabinoids bind to receptors in the hippocampus, the center for memory processing in your brain. The harder we exercise the more endocannabinoids are produced and the more active the hippocampus becomes. This results in optimum conditions for improved memory.

As life gets busier it is easy to skip a workout because of other demands and the more workouts you skip, the harder it is to convince yourself to increase the intensity of those workouts, but this could lead to a cycle of depressed memory and brain function.

More is better

It won’t come as any surprise that the third reason to exercise is improved health. Exercise impacts every system in the body and if it was a drug everyone would have a prescription.

New research confirms that more exercise is better and contrary to the well-meaning recommendations of health professionals, more intense exercise is even better.

Researchers at Cambridge University studied more than 96,000 middle-aged adults to understand the link between moderate-intensity exercise, recommended in the health guidelines of 150 minutes a week, with the risk of premature death.

What did they find?

More is better. Harder is better. Expending more energy is strongly associated with a lower risk of death and it doesn’t even have to be that much more. When participants did the equivalent of a 35-minute stroll with 2 minutes of brisk walking they reduced their risk by 30%.

Those who did an hour of walking that included 35 minutes of brisk walking reduced their risk of premature death by 50%.

“Our results show that doing more activity of any intensity is beneficial, but that expending those calories in more intense activity is better still. By gradually building up the intensity of physical activity we do each day we can improve our future health.”

Dr. Tessa Strain of the MRC Epidemiology Unit, and lead author on the paper, University of Cambridge

Why exercise?

Any exercise improves your health, more exercise results in more benefits. Get your daily dose and do a little endurance activity, a little intense activity and definitely do some strength training.

Change your mind, change your health,

Shayla