Including exercising into your daily routine is essential for a healthy quality of life. Everyone benefits from a form of exercise, whether it’s endurance, strength, balance, and flexibility. It’s only a matter of choosing any or even better if you combine a couple of the following four types of exercises as mentioned above. However, keep in mind to always warm-up before/after doing any type of exercise, and ask advice from qualified fitness professionals, especially your doctor.
Now, I’ll be explaining the benefits of the four types of exercise. Let’s begin with,
Endurance:
Endurance exercise, also known as aerobic, primarily focuses on stamina. The goal of doing endurance exercise is to help you keep fit and healthy while increasing your heart rate and breathing. This allows you to do activities you would like to do for longer periods without getting tired. Therefore, it improves your heart, lungs, and your circulatory system. Some examples of the exercises include walking, running, jogging, cycling to name a few.
Strength:
Strength training exercises focus on building stronger muscles. It’s also recognized as weight training, resistance training, for instance. The benefits of doing strength exercises is to help you enhance your cardiovascular health. Furthermore, it improves mobility, balance, posture, strong bones, weight loss, prevents injury and reduces the risk of chronic diseases. Examples of strength training exercises include lifting weights, squats, bench press, deadlifts, push-ups, and more. It’s a great choice if you are looking forward to increasing muscular strength.
Balance:
Balance training exercises help maintain coordination and prevent injuries such as falls. This exercise is definitely beneficial for older adults. Having good balance is essential for mobility, stability and improves awareness of position. The benefit of this exercise is increasing muscular strength and improving joint stability. The common exercises include tai chi, yoga, heel-to-toe-walk, single-leg balance, weight shifts, are a few examples.
Flexibility:
Flexibility training is the focus of stretching your muscles. The goal of stretching exercises is to enhance your range of motion and to allow your muscles to stay strong. Therefore, help prevent injuries, pain tension or soreness, improve your posture and mobility. For this reason, flexibility training is crucial and shouldn’t be neglected. So, it’s recommended to make it part of your daily exercising activities. The following are examples of flexibility exercises: back stretch exercise, forward lunges, inner thigh stretch, ankle stretch, side lunges, pilates, and yoga are common ones.
Sources:
- https://www.nia.nih.gov/health/infographics/four-types-exercise-and-physical-activity#:~:text=Research%20has%20shown%20that%20it’s,strength%2C%20balance%2C%20and%20flexibility.
- https://www.heart.org/en/healthy-living/fitness/fitness-basics/endurance-exercise-aerobic
- https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-depth/strength-training/art-20046670
- https://www.healthline.com/health/fitness/benefits-of-strength-training
- https://www.livescience.com/55321-balance-exercise.html
- https://www.mayoclinic.org/healthy-lifestyle/fitness/in-depth/balance-exercises/art-20546836#:~:text=Stand%20with%20your%20feet%20hip,repeat%20on%20the%20other%20side.