Risks of Not Exercising

Health is important, yet most people seem to only have a vague idea of the risks of not exercising. In this article, we'll take a look at five of the more important risk areas that comes with being a couch potato.

Some of these should be pretty obvious, while others may not be readily visible. In any case, bear in mind these are but a few of the hazards of an inactive lifestyle.

This is the Big Kahuna of non-exercise risks. Your heart is a muscle like any other and without regular exercises it weakens, just like a bicep or calf muscle that never gets any use. Then, when you suddenly need to move quickly, you heart just can't handle going from zero to 65 in a jiffy, with tragic results. Meanwhile, the lungs get inefficient at absorbing oxygen, giving you that depressing out-of-breath wheezing from walking a few stairs when the elevator is out of order. Finally, your blood pressure is higher, with stiffening of the blood vessels as a result. This in turn encourages plaque buildup, which sets the stage for strokes and other potential disasters down the road.

The extra pounds that come with too many hours on the couch speaks volumes about your inactive life, especially coupled with poor dietary habits. Life altering health problems, general discomfort, professional discrimination, social challenges, extra costs and travel hassles are but of few of the downsides of letting the waistline go.

Type two diabetes is on the rise in the world, partially because of too much junk food, sugary drinks and other processed foods, but also because we're becoming increasingly sedentary. The mechanism is simple -- too much sugar in the diet causes frequent, big blood sugar spikes. These are harmful, so the body releases insulin to rapidly cut the blood sugar to manageable levels. It does this by force-feeding the excess sugar into the muscles and liver. Unfortunately, if this force-feeding happens too frequently, the insulin receptors gets dulled and eventually stops responding almost entirely. Hence, diabetes -- the inability to regulate blood sugar with tissue damage, loss of eyesight and other dangers as potential result. Now, exercise not only uses blood sugar up naturally, it also helps to sharpen the insulin receptors so as to keep the dulling effect at bay.

Perhaps the least obvious among the risks of not exercising is the impact on your joints and bones. A frequently exercised (and stretched) joint is flexible, while an unused one is weaker, less elastic and more prone to nasty tears. Muscle shortening, which goes hand in hand with this, can further the problem by creating involuntary imbalances in the body that causes injuries over time. As for the bones, elderly women in particular are susceptible to bone brittleness. Part of this has to do with calcium intake, but exercise is another key component in keeping the bone mass intact. Simply put -- use it or lose it!

Unfortunately, today's society is heavily prejudiced against the obese and many overweight people suffer socially with depression as a result. It is also worth mentioning that exercise releases endorphins, the body's own "happy drug", which has made exercise one of the cornerstones in today's professional treatment of depression. Exercise builds physical confidence, works out bent-up tensions, jolts the brain chemistry and generally stabilizes your whole system with a general feel-good experience, while lack of exercise achieves the polar opposite.

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