Exercise Essentials!

​So, we all know that exercise is good for us; there is a huge body of evidence that exercise has massive benefits to both our mental and physical wellbeing, regular physical activity can help to reduce the risk of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, cancer, depression and dementia. A sedentary life has been described by health care professionals as the ‘silent killer’, prolonged inactivity is just about the worst thing that we can do for our health! So what is exercise doing that helps so much?

-It helps lower LDL cholesterol (which is the bad one), and helps increase HDL (which is the good   one).
-It helps our heart to contract forcefully and frequently, helping to lower our resting heart rate and blood pressure by increasing blood flow through our arteries.
-It makes our bones bear weight, which is the best way to strengthen them and reduce the risk of osteoporosis.
-Exercise has numerous amazing benefits for our mental health, it helps improve of self esteem, reduce stress and anxiety , and also produces endorphins which increase our sense of wellbeing and happiness.  
​
These are only a couple of reasons, but you get the idea, exercise is the easiest way for us to improve our quality of life. But the big question is: how much should we be doing? and what sort?

The NHS have recently brought out new guidelines to help give us a nudge in the right direction:
We should aim to be active daily, looking for over 150 minutes of physical activity a week. To really benefit our health we want to move quickly enough to raise our heart rate, breath faster and feel warmer, if we can still talk this would be moderate intensity activity. When it gets harder to string a sentence together without taking a big breath it’s vigorous intensity activity, here we get a significant increase in health benefits. Because of it’s higher intensity, we don’t need to do as much of it (more like 75 minutes a week), the idea being that one minute of vigorous exercise provides the same health benefits as two minutes of moderate exercise!

It’s tricky though, exercise is easy enough to do, the problem is that it is also easy to not do. The key is to find something that you enjoy, so that it doesn’t seem like a chore. Often joining a club can be great way of maintaining motivation. We can also vary our types of exercise, trying to find a mix of aerobic e.g. swimming, running, nordic walking (great for getting the heart rate up!) or cycling, with strengthening e.g. Yoga, pilates or weights.  With the days getting longer it’s only going to get easier to get out and moving!