Exercising Your Way to a Healthy Lifestyle

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What counts most is not the number of years you add to your life but the life you add to your years. But before you start your plan of incorporating exercise to your life plan, you must know first your fitness level. A simple way to determine this is to check your heart. You may want to try the Stairs Test in order to check the status of your heat. You may want to try this. Be comfortable. Remove your shoes. Pick a staircase with at least ten steps. Climb up. Climb down. Then up again. Nonstop. If, by the time you reach the top on your second climb, and you are out of breath, then you need to do something about it immediately. If you are breathless on your first climb, then you need help fast.

Fitness is one way of preserving health. It has several levels. Beginner, moderate, and advanced. The fitness craze with its ultimate objective of developing a perfect body in form and function through diet, nutrition, and exercise has swept the world. The keyword is commitment. How committed are you to adopting good health practices?

Life span is a concept which implies that an individual’s existence has a beginning and an end. With increasing age, tendons, skin and blood vessels lose elasticity. After the age of 65, diseases of the heart are the single largest cause of death. Therefore, the heart becomes vulnerable to disease with advancing age. The amount of blood pumped by the heart diminishes by 50 percent between the ages of 50 and 90. However, there are 80-year-old individuals who may have the cardiac function like that of a 40-year old. The heart in peak condition can pump blood to nearly three times its heart rate.

Now probably you might be asking, why is there a need to exercise? Exercise tones the muscles, conditions the body and burns fat. If you are already slim and want to maintain your weight but firm up your muscles, and then embark on a low-impact aerobic program coupled with weight training. If you are overweight and wish to burn fat, you should sign up for aerobics, start with the beginners, then move up to advanced classes for a high-fat burning routine. And if there is still any energy left in you, do at least thirty minutes of weight training. Take a look at what exercise could do for you:

1. Women who are physically fit have a 98 percent lower risk of premature death than women who live sedentary lives.

2. Physically fit people are eight times less likely to die of heart diseases than people who are unfit.

3. Exercise can improve IQ in older people. Improved circulation due to regular exercise can keep the IQ sharp.

4. One of the best antidotes for depressions, emotional stress, and mental fatigue is physical activity.

5. Walking, especially, can help your mind relax, thus, relieving stress.

Now taking all of these considerations, and incorporating in the advantages of having a holistic well-being, we should come to realize that we have the obligation to treat our bodies with respect. We only live once. We only have one body. And we only have this one chance to take care of our well-being. So start now.