Most people tend to be haphazard about their exercise habits. The idea is that if you can get a little run in, or go out on the bike, you tend to feel good immediately after. Psychologically, it feels like you’ve done your “chore” or “good deed” for the day, which will lead to good health.
Certainly a little exercise is better than none at all, but unfortunately this is not how health or fitness works! Fitness itself is often defined as a general condition of being physically fit and healthy. To achieve this general condition, you have to engage in a number of different types of exercises, all of which are meant to improve various parts of your physical well being.
The great thing about varied exercise is that it breaks up the monotony of daily exercise by introducing different activities, and each type of exercise helps support the others. Here are 4 different types of exercise you can practice to make yourself more fit and healthy overall.
Aerobic Exercise
Aerobic exercises have to do with any sort of activity that increases your heart-rate and breathing. When you engage in activities like these, you strengthen your lungs, heart, and circulatory system. Because of this, aerobic exercises provide benefits to your overall fitness that are broad and far-reaching.
As your endurance goes up, you are better able to engage in everyday activities, and you can continue doing strength and flexibility training for longer periods of time. Better circulation allows blood to get to your muscles easier, which improves strength and movement too.
Aerobics can lower blood pressure, burn off body fat, reduce inflammation, lower blood sugar levels, and much more. Popular aerobics activities include running, jogging, swimming, biking, and tennis. Finding creative ways to make your aerobic workouts more challenging is a great way to improve your fitness, as well. For example, Paradiso Crossfit in Culver City, CA encourages its members to run on the beach, where the uneven sand engages the core during the run.
Strength Training
Strength training is not just about looking “ripped” or beating someone at arm wrestling, though you can certainly have those things if you wanted! Muscle strength is beneficial in many different areas of health: it allows you to engage in daily activities more effectively, it helps your muscles better support your body, and it helps to stop you from slouching, among other benefits.
With stronger muscles, you are putting less of a strain on your joints and back, and aerobic and flexibility exercises come easier. Strong muscles also help to support your skeletal system and keep your bones strong. Common strength exercises include working with free weights and weight machines, using resistance bands, lunging, squatting, and doing push-ups.
Flexibility Exercises
The flexibility of your body can affect everything from your body’s movements to its circulation and its ability to breathe deeply. Not only does greater flexibility expand your range of movement when you conduct other types of exercises, it helps to relieve stress and loosen up muscles that may be causing you pain.
For example, lower back pain is often caused by tense muscles, and if you regularly engage in flexibility training that targets those muscles, your back pain may be dramatically reduced. Flexibility exercises are also great to combine with your aerobic and strength exercises, as more flexible muscles lessen stress and injury.
Common flexibility activities include yoga, calf and leg stretches, shoulder and arm stretches, and other types of stretching activities.
Balance Training
In general, balance training is meant to lessen the risks of a fall. For this reason balance training is often recommended to older adults, as falls can be more dangerous in old age. However everyone can benefit from some balance training here and there. After all, it only takes one bad tumble to sprain a wrist or ankle, which could bar you from exercise for a couple of weeks if the fall was bad enough.
Balance improves your overall fitness because it allows you to be more nimble and steady on your feet, which benefits all of your exercises and even daily activities, and lessens the risk of injury. Common balancing activities include standing on one foot and lifting your knee, heel-to-toe walking, tai chi, walking on uneven surfaces, and squatting. Flexibility training also tends to improve balance, and vice versa.
Putting It All Together
There are many ways to put together a varied exercise routine. Many people schedule different types of exercise activities on different days, or stagger them every other week. Other people combine different activities on a single day. Places like Crossfit gyms make it easy to combine multiple exercise types in one location.
Whatever your exercise schedule, it should be fairly easy to put together a diverse fitness program. There are specialized gyms everywhere, and many basic exercise activities just require entry level equipment in your own home. Incorporate these 4 types of exercise into your weekly fitness routine, and you’ll be healthier than you’ve ever been before!
Author Bio:
Carl Turner is a personal trainer and freelance lifestyle writer from Los Angeles, California. With over 10 years of experience, he has trained many clients and has helped them to reach their personal fitness goals. During his free time, he enjoys kayaking, hiking, and reading. Carl can be reached at carl.turner.freelance@gmail.com and his website is https://paradisocrossfit.com
