Benefits of Aerobic Exercise

Everybody knows that exercise is good for you, but what exactly are the benefits of aerobic exercise? How does aerobic exercise differ from anaerobic exercise, and can you substitute one for the other? This article takes a look at eight specific advantages you can gain from the former.

Aerobic vs. Anaerobic Exercise

Aerobic exercise is the kind that keeps your heart pounding for a while, utilizing the air you breathe to power a complex, calorie-burning process. Examples of this are jogging, swimming and using a Stairmaster.

Anaerobic exercise is explosive training, like lifting weights or jumping. There's no time to get the lengthy process started, so the body uses short-burst energy stored in the body's muscles and liver. If you feel lactic acid building up, you're in anaerobic territory.

These are very different types of exercise that come with their own specific advantages, but here we'll focus on aerobic exercise.

Eight Benefits of Aerobic Exercise

Some benefits of aerobic exercise are more obvious than others. Here are the eight most important ones:

• Weight control

Exercise burns calories, and if you burn more calories than you take in on a regular basis, you're bound to lose weight over time. This in turn comes with a slew of advantages ranging from less stress on joints and cardiac health to pure aesthetics.

• Lowers resting heart rate

The heart is a muscle. The more you exercise it, the more efficient it gets just like a bicep muscle gets stronger from weekly bicep curls. As a result, a regularly trained heart can pump the blood around your body using fewer beats per minute than a poorly trained one.

• Lower blood pressure

On the same note, this increased efficiency translates to less continuous pressure in the circulatory system. This in turn keeps the blood vessels healthy and prevents unnecessary hardening.

• Decreases cholesterol and blood fats

There's a delicate balance between LDL and HDL, the bad and the good kinds of cholesterol. Aerobic exercise helps tilt the balance in favor of the good kind, just as it helps manage the amount of fat circulating in the blood. Too much, and you're bound to get small chunks of it stuck to the insides of the arteries where it can build up to dangerous obstructions over time.

• Promotes joint health

Some types of low-impact aerobic exercise can help keep the joints in shape through regular usage that "greases up" the joints without subjecting them to undue stress. Obviously, this means nothing jarring like jogging on hard surfaces, but rather exercises like swimming or elliptical training machines.

• Improves mood

People suffering depression are commonly ordered to take up daily exercise. The endorphins the are released during prolonged activity work like the body's own happy pills, and there are few things more effective for getting frustration and aggression out of your system like a hard workout.

• Better sleep

Not only do you get the frustrations out, you get physically tired from exercise. While exercising immediately before bed isn't necessarily a good idea, your odds of getting a good, restful night's sleep increase dramatically with exercise.

• Prevents type II diabetes

Finally, aerobic exercise directly counteracts the mechanism that leads to type II diabetes. This is where your body gradually grows insensitive to insulin, making it harder and harder to regulate your blood sugar levels. Aerobic exercise makes the insulin receptors more sensitive again, while simultaneously burning off excess stored blood sugar.

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