Saturday, June 8, 2024

Exercising Minds, Exercising Bodies: Foreground the Necessity of Daily Exercise

 Exercising Minds, Exercising Bodies: Foreground the Necessity of Daily Exercise

The world is not an easy place to be a teenager: it is a phase filled with a plethora of increasing pressures that strain a teenager’s body, mind, and soul. Therefore, it becomes imperative to ensure that teenagers remain mindful of their health and well-being in this crucial part of their lives before they come of age.


Given the formative nature of the teenage years, habits learned during this time are more likely to stay with an individual well into adulthood. Therefore, the teenage years are the perfect time to develop the habit of exercising daily.


It is important to remember that teenagers need at least 60 minutes of physical activity to ensure optimum wellness. Such activity should include a healthy mix of aerobic exercises, muscle-strengthening, and bone-strengthening exercises. Examples of such activities include running, swimming, jumping rope, dancing, gymnastics, roller skating, cycling, hiking, or playing outdoor games.


Such exercises are crucial in preventing conditions such as chronic stress, high blood pressure, or high cholesterol, all of which lead to heart attacks and strokes later in life. Other physical benefits of exercise include how it helps in the improvement of blood circulation, as well as in fixing our sleep cycle. Further, regular exercise also helps revitalize our immune system by increasing our body’s resistance to colds, flu, and other such viruses.


It is important to understand how the positive effects of exercise are not limited to the body alone but spill into the realm of our mental health as well. This is because exercise has a proven effect in terms of improving our self-image as well as helping us fight anxiety and depression, in addition to increasing our optimism. This is because exercise triggers the release of endorphins in our body, thereby shaping our psychological states. 


Given how a lot of teenagers are conscious of their skin, exercise is instrumental in helping us with our skin too. This is because physical exercise boosts circulation in our body, thereby improving the delivery of nutrients to our skin, in addition to removing toxins from cells. Further, the increased delivery of oxygen to our body because of enhanced circulation also increases the production of collagen, which is the connective tissue responsible for smooth, elastic, and plump skin.


Here, it is important to remember that there is absolutely no such thing as too much exercise. Often, teenagers, once they begin exercising, are so swept away by the activity that they forget the healthy limits of exercise, and are therefore obsessed with the gym as well as with the idea of burning extra calories. 


This is why it is important to regulate the amount of exercise we undertake in order to derive the most optimal benefits from it.


Sources

  1. https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness/exercise-for-teenagers#too-much-exercise

  2. https://www.webmd.com/teens/benefits-of-exercise

  3. https://www.urmc.rochester.edu/encyclopedia/content.aspx?ContentTypeID=90&ContentID=P01602 

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