With the hustle and bustle world we live in today, some people may find personal fitness something that is not a priority. I personally chose this topic because I felt I have put my personal fitness on the back burner. Yes, because I had the same excuses millions of Americans have, “I just don’t have the time,” or “I’m just too busy!” The book The Basics of Health, defines physical activity as all body movements produced by skeletal muscles that result in substantial increases in energy expenditure. This activity is widely understood as a benefit to your health. But why do millions of Americans, just like me not make it a priority? I intend to answer that along with, do we truly understand what we are benefiting from this activity? And how can you improve your personal fitness?
According to the online article “Getting Started: making Physical Activity a Priority.” by Jon Caswell at the American Heart Association, “About two-thirds of kids and half of adults in the U.S. don’t get enough physical activity, and three out of 10 adults don’t get ANY exercise.” “I’m just too busy!” or “I just don’t have the time,” seems to be the common excuse most Americans use. We all have time to do what we believe is important in our lives, and it is unmistakably true that we all do what we do because we make time for it. When it comes to being a couch potato, we make plenty of time for it, with the addition of the excessive time most of us spend sitting at work, in front of a pc, or watching TV. We are prioritizing, but those of us who are the statistic, we are not prioritizing correctly by any means. Life regularly gets very chaotic and taxing. As work piles up, and parenting duties don’t stop, taking care of your physical health becomes one your lowest priorities. Fast, inexpensive, and processed foods become time and money saving selections, while physical activity gets put on the back burner. Before you know it, the pounds start to add on. Typically, when a busy person sees that lucrative free slot in their schedule, they tend to take that period to “relax” on the couch, watch some TV, or go through their social media. As time passes, this can profoundly affect your physical well-being, and begin to give you that general unpleasant feeling and in turn could lower your self-esteem, cause lack of sleep, or cause you to get sick more regularly. Creating and prioritizing time for your physical health is crucial for your well-being. It is recommended in the book that adults get at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity a week. Whether its going the gym with a friend, biking, or preferring to walk instead of driving, there are numerous ways to begin to get your body moving. This is particularly imperative in the loaded life of a full-time, parent, student, and worker.
It doesn’t take a physician to know that physical activity reaps many health benefits, and like the book states, most Americans already know that there are some benefits. But what most Americans don’t know, is the extent and how many health benefits we gain from some physical activity. The extensive array of physical, social, and mental health benefits may come as a bit of a surprise to some people and it would take entirely too long to try to name them all. Exercise has long been known to can lower risk factors like high blood pressure, high blood sugar and high cholesterol, which in turn reduces the risk of heart disease and diabetes. For women, you’d might be surprised to hear that the chance of getting breast cancer can be reduced with exercise. Exercise could protect women by cutting fat, specifically dangerous belly fat, whose metabolic movement may produce tumor development in breast tis sue. Colon cancer may work differently, and like Alice Park states in her Time article “Lack of Exercise as Deadly as Smoking, Study Finds,” “researchers believe that exercise helps keep digestion regular and prevents potentially cancer-causing waste from encouraging abnormal growths in the colon.” Although my research was limited, I did do plenty of web searching, but I found the information in the book lays out the health benefits from physical activity very well. The psychological changes you get from physical activity reduce the likelihood of many diseases and illnesses. And quite often, physical activity helps control stress and helps increase self-esteem. It was quite surprising for me finding out that the health benefits included the reduction in risk of cancer, improvement in mental health, and improvement of immunity. For someone who absolutely hates getting sick, that was definitely a selling point. Aside from the benefits I mentioned, frequent and regular physical exercise boosts the disease-fighting system, and helps reduce the risk of cardiovascular diseases, improves bone mass, reduces risk of osteoporosis, improves weight management, and stress management. Social, and mental health benefits to be gained from physical activity are also quite extensive. Maintaining positive self- confidence by increasing your sexually attractive qualities, or body image, will link to a higher number of social interactions and in turn could prevent depression. Lastly, and for me, the most important was the studies that found that physical activity could essentially equal a longer life span. With regular activity, studies indicate significant decreases in long-term health risk and increases in years lived.
Improving your personal fitness is only as difficult as you make it. Upon reading a few articles, and doing some research, I came to realized that. I am single handedly getting in my own way of getting my much-needed physical activity in. There a plenty of quick easy ways to get your body going, and that could eventually turn into a routine. For some individuals, physical activity equals exercising at a gym, buying equipment, and even special clothes or shoes. Actually, it’s much simpler than that. Any physical movement is a good thing, but I’m coming to understand that it seems that the creation of the habit of physical activity is what plays into the greatest changes in your life. But, the toughest part may be creating the habit, physical activity will have to become one of your top priorities. As Hanly, Lau states on here article “Tips on Improving Fitness Levels.” on LIVESTRONG.COM, “Training frequency is the most important aspect of improving your fitness.” So, the key to success is changing your routine by increasing your regular level of activity during the day, every day with incremental, continued changes to your life. There are many basic strategies to get started, something as easy as a daily stroll during a break can do great things for your health. Walking seems to be the easiest approach to begin a fitness journey. But there are endless possibilities to start with and numerous tips like parking your vehicle in further spots when getting to work or going shopping, heading for the stairs instead of the elevator, exercise while you watch TV with a stationary bike or some floor exercises, or making the trip to the mailbox a walking opportunity for the dog. To catch your eye, try to do something you already enjoy, to make it fun. Things like sports, dancing, working on your yard, hiking or even shopping. The key is to start slowly if need be, and build gradually over time. An easy way to make physical activity a habit is to exercise at the same time of day on the days you choose to do it and use a variety of activities to keep yourself interested.
You could make time your least busiest days of the week a priority for physical activity. For certain, you will have to manage and negotiate some time just like having any new priority. Most importantly, you need to do whatever you need to, to make it happen! Whether it’s an extra set of clothes in the car, tennis shoes at work, or even shortening your lunch break so you could walk some. Whatever you choose to do, don’t over complicate it, anything works and the long-term effects make it all worth it.