Understanding the best ways of looking after your body is important for promoting a healthy lifestyle. However, while many people immediately consider running, weight lifting, or contact sports, these options are only for some. The heavy impact can affect your muscles and joints, causing further problems even if you get into shape.
Here are the 5 top benefits of low-impact workouts and what they can potentially do for you:-
1. Control Your Weight
Like any exercise and activity, low-impact workouts can help you control your weight. However, because they are not as intense as high-impact alternatives, don’t expect to burn lots of fat quickly. Instead, you can use the workouts to keep your weight steady and avoid gaining pounds after consuming too many calories. Like with other workouts, you get as much as you put into it, so if you want to lose weight, walk or cycle further and longer.
It’s also a good idea to change up your exercise routines as your body can become familiar with the same old patterns and this may stall your weight loss a little. Push yourself more as you become fitter, whilst still keeping your exercises low impact. This will help keep your body burning fat and on its toes.
You also want to do various types of exercises to help with over-all body tone and muscle building, hitting all those target areas and every muscle group.
2. Lessen Injuries
Low-impact workouts are always an excellent way to lessen injuries and help you build consistency.
Check out the best low-impact exercises that also prevent injuries from occurring too frequently such as walking, cycling, or swimming. Compared to other activities, low-impact solutions do not put too much pressure on your muscles and joints to avoid the typical soreness or risk strains. With this, you can go for regular walks or cycles without worrying about demanding too much of your body.
3. Boosting Flexibility
You can also use low-impact exercises to increase your flexibility and prevent muscle pulls and similar injuries. Exercises like yoga are ideal for improving your flexibility, and you can also speak to your osteopath to get further advice about which other activities will work best for you.
Boosting flexibility is a great way to stay active as you get older, especially as you may not be able to run or walk as quickly as you once did but still want to remain as active as possible.
There’s nothing quite like having a flexible body and being able to bend and stretch as you please without aches and pain. This is what give you the appearance of being youthful and sprightly.
4. Improves Active Lifestyle
You don’t need to run 5K every day to live an active lifestyle and just 30 minutes of activity is enough to ensure you stay healthy and avoid the pitfalls of sitting on the sofa all day. There’s no point in throwing yourself into extreme or intense activity immediately because your body may not be able to handle it and you are more likely to struggle. However, building fitness and conditioning with low-impact activities like yoga, swimming, or cycling can prepare you for other activities.
Start with these first and see where your new fitness levels take you. Starting slow will also help negate fears of injury because you are allowing your body to build up to higher levels of activity slowly.
5. Promotes Mental Health
Similarly, spending your whole day inside doing nothing is bound to affect your mental well-being. You could face the risk of becoming depressed or finding anxiety increase, so understanding the mental health benefits of any exercise is vital.
Exercise of any kind helps you feel better and encourages a positive mindset, and although it won’t solve all your problems, it gives you a fantastic platform to build upon.
The best exercises for mental health are out in the sunshine or outdoors as much as possible. This way you get a three in one effect of the vitamin D (good for depression), the fresh air in your lungs and the sunlight in your eyes. Getting at least 30 minutes of sunlight into your retinas daily (even if it’s a low light emitting/cloudy day) helps to ease depressive symptoms and symptoms of SAD (seasonal affected disorder).
Low-impact workouts are as tough and effective as intense exercise. Yoga is perfect for building up a sweat while also finding balance and inner peace, while anyone who’s ever biked up a mountain will tell you it’s as challenging as it is rewarding. If you want to get into better shape but need low-impact workouts, consider these benefits and options.
Exercise and Diet
As you age your joints naturally become weaker and bones more brittle. You’ll also find with age that injuries can take a lot longer to heal and inflammation can take more time to subside. These are the pitfalls of age, but it doesn’t have to be that way. For instance, eating a highly anti-inflammatory diet such as the plant based diet can make a huge difference to how your body copes with the stresses and strains of exercise.
Eating a high plant diet, instead of inflammation promoting meats and dairy products, will help you recover from exercise, both low impact and high impact, faster.
Other ways to help keep inflammation to a minimum is to eat anti inflammatory foods proven to help such as turmeric powder or supplements. This unique little spice has been used for thousands of years in Asian cuisine and has recently become hugely popular in the Western world for it’s amazing health benefits.
Adding some organic turmeric powder to your meals is a great way to inexpensively help you recover from low impact (and high impact) exercise.
Here’s some great ways to add it to your diet:-
- Sprinkle into your porridge
- Mix into cooked rice, quinoa or other grains
- Add to mashed potatoes
- Sprinkle onto potatoes before roasting
- Add to curries, soups and stews
- Add to your homemade, weight loss spice mix.
CONCLUSION
Low-impact workouts are as tough and effective as intense exercise.
Yoga is perfect for building up a sweat while also finding balance and inner peace, while anyone who’s ever biked up a mountain will tell you it’s as challenging as it is rewarding. If you want to get into better shape but need low-impact workouts, consider the benefits and options in this post.
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