.svg)
Exercise Routines for Health and Fitness: Moderate and High-intensity Workouts
It is no news that regular physical activity is key to healthy living. Like real machines, your body needs to be used regularly to work efficiently. This is why one of the most beneficial things you can do for your health is to exercise regularly. It offers several advantages, including boosting your energy level and lowering your risk of developing cardiovascular diseases.
Besides enhancing your cardiovascular health, exercise promotes blood flow to your brain, thus improving your mental health. A steady workout routine can give you a sense of well-being, improve memory, and make you sleep better at night. This article explores different types of exercise routines that can promote overall health and fitness and how you can curate a realistic workout routine for yourself.
Types of Exercise Routines to Improve Health and Physical Fitness
There is no single workout that can meet all of your physical health needs. To get the most out of your routine, experts advise you should do a variety of activities throughout the week. There are different types of exercises; you get better results when you choose a combination of activities that cater to your needs. Research shows that you can gain tremendous benefits by doing a mix of four types of exercise: endurance activities, strength training, balance training, and flexibility and stretching. Each of these activities has its unique benefits. No matter your age, gender, or physical capabilities, you can find activities that cater to your fitness needs.
Endurance Activity
Often referred to as cardio or aerobics, endurance exercise boosts your breathing and heart rate. This prompts your heart to beat faster by allowing enough oxygen into your blood. Thus increasing blood flow to your muscles and back to your lungs. Endurance activities help keep your heart, lungs, and circulatory system healthy. This type of workout also helps prevent heart diseases, diabetes, and certain types of cancers. Another advantage of engaging in endurance activities is that they help burn calories and cut down unwanted fat. The more challenging the aerobic exercise is, the more calories you burn. Some common examples of endurance activities include running, walking, brisk walking, swimming, and cycling.
Experts advise adults between the ages of 19 to 64 to engage in at least 150 minutes of endurance activity, 75 minutes of vigorous cardio activity a week, or a mixture of both activities. Aerobic exercises should be spread out through the course of the week. You can do cardio in shorter periods and increase the duration as you gain more stamina. What matters most is consistency.
Strength Training
Strength training is important to your fitness training regimen. This type of exercise challenges your muscles by putting them up against a resistance that requires them to apply force against. Strength training activities can help you lose weight, strengthen your bones and improve muscular fitness. They also improve your capacity to perform day-to-day activities such as lifting and pulling. Your weekly fitness routine should include strength training of all the major muscle groups. Typically strength training activities are done with equipment such as free weights, weight machines, and resistance bands to prevent bone loss and help build or tone muscles.
Experts recommend doing strength training two or more times a week and using increasing resistance or gradually increasing weights to make your muscles stronger. Refrain from doing strength training every day, instead, wait for at least 48hours before engaging in another strength training activity to allow your muscles to heal and get stronger.
Balance Training
As we become older, our sense of balance tends to deteriorate. Poor balance is likely to cause falls which can lead to fractures and temporary or permanent physical disability. To prevent this, balance training needs to be included in your fitness routine. Balance exercises help you maintain your balance by improving the muscles that help you stay upright, such as your legs and core.
Examples of balance exercises include yoga, Pilates, and tai chi. Some strength training that works core muscles in your torso can also help with balance. Though balance training is usually recommended for the elderly, anyone can benefit from doing them as they help strengthen your core muscles. Balance training equipment such as Indo board, Fitball, and Bosuball help strengthen core muscles and improve during balance exercises.
Flexibility and Stretching
Stretching keeps your muscles flexible and helps the joint to maintain a range of motion. When the muscles are not flexible and strong enough, they become tight and shorten over time. Tight and shortened muscles are often weak and unable to extend all the way when needed for certain activities. Flexibility exercises help increase the joints’ capacity to sustain the movement necessary for carrying out daily tasks and physical activity that require flexibility.
Regular stretching exercises can also help relieve muscle stress and tension, and promote better posture. Flexibility exercises should be done during your regular workout routine when your muscles are warm and responsive to stretching. Exercises such as yoga and pilates prevent muscles from getting stiff and tight and help ward off back pain.
Making the Most of Your Workout Time: How to Get the Best Results from Your Exercise Routine
Everyone gets into fitness to achieve a goal. Whether it's to lose weight, build strength, relieve mental stress, or just to promote general wellbeing. To get your desired results, you have to engage in effective exercises. Here are some tips to help you double your workout effectiveness.
- Limit your work out to 30-40 minutes.
- Build your endurance and launch into high-intensity workouts.
- Practice slow lifting during strength training.
- Choose a cardio exercise you enjoy.
- Change your workout routine every 2 weeks to avoid boredom.
- Maintain good form during your exercises.
- Integrate more proteinous foods into your diet.
- Drink plenty of water during workout sessions.
The Bottom Line
At first, incorporating regular exercise into your daily routine may seem tough. However, you can start slowly and break up your workout time into bits. You also need to work smart, since you can’t afford to work out for long hours each day. Remember, consistency is key when it comes to exercising. Set goals for yourself. The goals should be challenging but also achievable. Also, bear in mind that there are no shortcuts when it comes to exercise, you only get results when you put in the work!
Related posts
Exercise Routines for Health and Fitness: Moderate and High-intensity Workouts
There are different types of exercises; you get better results when you choose a combination of activities that cater to your needs. Research shows that you can gain tremendous benefits by doing a mix of four types of exercise: endurance activities, strength training.
Foam Dressings: Benefits And Applications
Non-adhesive foam dressings require the use of an additional secondary dressing to be secured in position. In general, thin foam dressings have an adhesive wound contact layer.
Hydrogel Wound Dressings: Benefits And Applications
Hydrogel wound dressings belong to the class of modern wound dressings that actively stimulate the wound healing process. They are composed of synthetic polymers with a high water content formed in the shape of sheets, amorphous gels, and foams.
Alginate Wound Dressings: Benefits And Applications
In the United States, approximately 6 million people are affected by chronic wounds. The number is only expected to increase with the rise in the elderly population. Wound dressings form an essential component of wound care.
How Obesity and Overweight Affects Wound Healing
Obesity and excessive weight are conditions that continue to disproportionately affect Black and African American people in the United States.
Understanding and Tackling Hypertension in African American Communities
Hypertension, also known as high blood pressure, is more prevalent in African American communities than in other racial groups in the United States. A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) report indicated that about 5 in 10 non-Hispanic Black adults are hypertensive.
Understanding the Risk Factors for Pressure Ulcers
Pressure ulcers, also called bedsores or decubitus ulcers, are areas of localized damage to the skin and underlying tissue. They result from unrelieved pressure on the skin, friction, shear, or a combination of these.
The Role of Artificial Intelligence in Amputation Prevention
With the various technological advancements, amputation prevention through proper wound care is an attractive area for Artificial Intelligence (AI). In 2002, the whole world was in awe when Google brain, an Artificial Intelligence research team, could find a cat in a YouTube video.
The Role of Advanced Biologics (Skin Substitutes) in Wound Healing
For a long time now, limb amputation has affected the mobility of African Americans living with chronic diseases. Worse still, studies have shown that limb amputation among diabetes
Know Better, Do Better: Adopting Healthy Lifestyles for Amputation Prevention
Black Americans are twice as likely to develop pulmonary artery disease (PAD) – a leading cause of lower limb amputation – as any other race.
Tackling the Education Gap: Encouraging Medical Careers Among Black Students
Black and African American doctors make up 5% of all active physicians in the country – a mere 45,534 healthcare professionals. With the African American population at about 46.9 million, it is clear why Black communities are underserved.
The Amputation Epidemic in Black America: What Everyone Needs to Know
Peer-reviewed studies have revealed that black patients are three times more likely to lose limbs than the national average. In black populated areas with little or no access to quality healthcare...
.jpg)
Why Are Black People Losing Limbs More Often?
Now more than ever, Blacks and African Americans are losing lower extremity limbs. In recent years, there has been a stark difference in the amputation rates in Black and white communities.
Peripheral Arterial Disease (PAD) and Its Impact On Wound Care
Peripheral Artery Disease (PAD) is the narrowing of the arteries in the arms, legs, and internal organs. It’s often caused by atherosclerosis which is the buildup of fat and cholesterol – called plaque – in the arteries.
Promoting Physical Exercise and Mobility in African American Communities
Inadequate physical inactivity has increasingly been recognized as a leading cause of mobility problems and early mortality in the world.
A Spotlight on Healthcare Disparities in African American Communities
Even with promising interventions such as the enactment of the Affordable Care Act, healthcare equality in the U.S. seems like a distant goal. African Americans are still more likely to be burdened with chronic diseases
Avenues for Promoting Health Awareness in African Communities
Disparities in healthcare remain a serious problem in African American communities. The history of slavery and other social determinants like systemic racism and access to healthy foods undoubtedly underlie the inexcusably poor state of African American health.
The State of Black Health in America
Over 150 years from the abolishment of slavery, healthcare in America is stilled marred by systemic racial discrimination and inequality. According to the CDC, 20.2 percent of black American adults are living in fair or poor health. This is a visibly higher population compared to white, non-Hispanic (14.1 percent).
Black Nutrition: Are You Eating The Right Diet?
Blacks have dietary preferences born from cultural influence. A study conducted on 7,000 men and women over 45 years living across the U.S. found that Black participants were more likely to eat a diet comprising highly processed foods compared to their White counterparts. Further, 46% of Blacks and 33% of Whites developed hypertension, with diet being the reason for much of the disparity.
Debridement: A Critical Component of Wound Treatment
Debridement is a part of the standard DIME technique for wound bed preparation in chronic wounds.
What is Negative Pressure Wound Therapy and How Does it Benefit Patients?
Negative Pressure Wound Therapy (NPWT) aims to facilitate wound healing by modifying the pressure over a wound surface.
The Benefits of Telemedicine To Wound Care
Telemedicine is particularly beneficial in long-term care facilities where a significant number of Americans living with chronic conditions such as non-healing wounds reside.
Why are Some Wounds Slow To Heal?
Chronic slow-healing wounds are those that fail to progress through a timely and predictable sequence of repair.
What is Hyperbaric Oxygen Wound Therapy and How Does it Benefit Patients?
Chronic non-healing wounds such as diabetic foot ulcers and venous insufficiency ulcers remain in the inflammatory state despite adequate management, prolonging wound healing, and adversely affecting the quality of life of patients.
Diagnosis and Management of Pressure Ulcers
Leading research estimates a prevalence of up to 27% of pressure ulcers in patients living at long-term care facilities. Elderly patients (above 70 years of age), obese patients, patients with limited mobility, and those with underlying medical conditions e.g., peripheral arterial disease, and multiple sclerosis are the most at risk of developing pressure ulcers.
Compression Therapy for Wound Management
For patients living with chronic wounds such as venous ulcers, compression therapy can help to ease symptoms and aid wound healing.
Democratizing Wound Care in Hospice Care Facilities
Hospice care facilities provide care for the terminally ill, including patients battling late-stage cancer, heart disease, and kidney failure, as well as those living with chronic non-healing wounds.
Dealing With Diabetic Foot Ulcers During The Pandemic
People living with diabetes represent a subset of individuals with special health needs due to the nature of the disease.
What Clinicians Need To Know About Wound Care Dressings
To healthcare experts, choosing the right dressing is critical to improving wound healing outcomes in patients.
.svg)
.svg)
