5 surprising benefits of exercise you never knew about

You already know how important exercise is for your physical health, right? A varied, balanced exercise program:

• Improves your cardiovascular fitness, muscle strength, flexibility and balance;
• Helps you avoid weight gain or regain (although it’s not that effective for promoting weight loss);
• Improves your sleep quality;
• Reduces your risk of developing type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease and several types of cancer; and
• Helps you live longer.

That’s pretty impressive list of benefits, and all of them are excellent reasons to get more active.

But lately, I’ve been focusing on a very different set of benefits of exercise when I’m ‘selling’ my clients on the absolute, not-negotiable, no-excuses necessity of working some form of physical activity into every single day:

Exercise is phenomenally good for your emotional and mental well-being as well.

#1 Exercise helps you think more clearly and remember better.

These benefits are believed to be largely due to a substance called brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), which is kind of like Miracle-Gro for your brain. BDNF maintains the health of your existing neurons (brain cells), stimulates new ones to grow, and also encourages the formation of connections between the neurons (called synapses) which are crucial for learning and long-term memory formation.

Even a single episode of exercise bumps up your BDNF production, and the more often you work out, the bigger the boost you get from each exercise session. Talk about the gift that keeps on giving!!!

This is why I tell all of my clients who are students, to intersperse their study sessions with exercise breaks. A good ratio for most people is to study for 50 minutes to an hour, then exercise vigorously (jump rope, ride an exercise bike, bounce on a trampoline, do a HIIT or Tabata workout, run around the block) for 10-15 minutes, then return to studying for another hour or so.

#2 Exercise improves your mood.

BDNF is also believed to play a significant role in the mood-boosting effect of exercise, probably helped out by endorphins and noradrenaline which are also stimulated by exercise.

Working out regularly doesn’t just protect you against becoming depressed in the first place; it provides significant relief of depressive symptoms, both in people diagnosed with depression and those who are just going through a rough patch. What’s fascinating is that the more depressed you are, the greater the benefit you’ll get from regular exercise. But even if you’re just having a bit of a blue day, a workout will brighten your mood – and keep you happy afterwards for far longer than bingeing on chocolate or ice cream!

An exercise program was found to be just as effective at relieving the symptoms of depression as the antidepressant drug Zoloft, but even more importantly, it was more effective than Zoloft at preventing people who had recovered from relapsing back into depression.

#3 Exercise relieves anxiety and panic attacks.

A workout relieves anxiety both in those who are particularly prone to it all the time (called ‘trait anxiety’) and those who are just temporarily worried about an upcoming event (called ‘state anxiety’). I was chuffed to read advice on handling exam anxiety from the learning support teacher in my son’s high school newsletter, which recommended exercise as a pre-exam tension buster :). Even panic attacks, a severe manifestation of anxiety that is very difficult to treat, are relieved by exercise – and the more strenuous the exercise, the better. Psychologist Doug Lisle provides an excellent explanation of why exercise works so well to dispel panic attacks, and how to use it to bust panic, in two free webinars which you can watch here and here.

#4 Exercise provides you with interim rewards that sustain long-term goals.

The problem with health improvement goals is that the outcome you’re after may be a fair way off, even if you’re really diligent in working toward it. For example, if you have a significant amount of excess weight to lose, it’s going to take many months, and possibly even a couple of years, until you reach your ideal weight. The undeniable reality is that even if you stay 100% on track with your healthy eating meal plan today, with no overeating and no ‘cheating’, you will still be overweight tonight. It’s not like you eat a healthy meal or three and – bam! – your excess 20 kg just falls off you.

Staying focused on long-term goals can be difficult when the reward is so far off in the future. But exercise provides immediate rewards, both in terms of the mood-lifting effect mentioned above, and the palpable improvement in fitness that occurs day by day. Each time you exercise, you’ll notice you can walk a little further; go uphill a bit faster; lift a little more weight; stretch just a little further… and this sense of progress will sustain you when the scales and mirror are telling you that you’re still a long way from where you want to be.

I train my clients to focus on these incremental improvements, celebrating each little win as a milestone along the road to their ultimate goal.

Closely related to this is the final benefit:

#5 Exercise redefines your sense of possibility.

Many of my clients struggle with limiting beliefs about what they’re capable of. Much of their ill-health and unhappiness is attributable to them feeling ‘stuck’ – whether in jobs that stifle their creativity; relationships that don’t nurture them; or just habits of living that sabotage their well-being. What keeps them stuck is the sense that they are incapable of changing.

Psychologists call it ‘low self-efficacy’ – it’s the belief that nothing you do makes any difference to what happens to you in life, so why bother even trying to make things better? This belief gives rise to thoughts such as “I’ll never get to my goal weight,” “I’ve always been hopeless at cooking and I”ll never be any good at it,” “I have a terrible memory; I just can’t learn new things,” and feelings of despair, hopelessness and powerlessness.

How could exercise possibly fix this? Because it changes your sense of what is possible for you. Let me give you a personal example. A couple of years ago, I stumbled across some high intensity interval training (HIIT) workouts on Youtube. I’d done some HIIT before, but never in my life had I seen anything like Lisa Marie from BodyRock‘s workouts!!

I looked on in awe as she smashed out one-armed push-ups and ninja tuck jumps, and lifted weights that were far beyond my capability. Rather than giving up and finding an ‘easier’ fitness channel, I modified the exercises so that I could manage them, and did my best to keep up with this petite English dynamo with an endearing Northern accent and the most cut arms and ripped abs I’ve seen on a woman who isn’t abusing steroids ;).

Now, several years down the track, I can – for the first time in my life – do 50 seconds of continuous full push-ups (and I can even balance on 1 foot while doing them!), do tuck jumps like a pro, and lift weights that would have given me a hernia when I first started ;-). I didn’t really have weight to lose when I started working out with Lisa Marie, but my body shape has changed markedly in ways that I didn’t think were possible.

And realising that you can do more than you thought you were capable of physically, has a knock-on effect when it comes to what you think you’re capable of in other domains of life. All sorts of new possibilities open up that had never occurred to you when you were stuck in your sense of limited physical possibilities.

So there you have it – 5 extra motivators to work exercise into your daily routine.

I’d love to hear your story about how exercise has benefited your psychological well-being. Leave a comment below.

Need help with getting unstuck when it comes to incorporating exercise into your life? Apply for a Roadmap to Optimal Health Consultation today.