TRUE TRENDING TIPS: The Most Effective Exercises to Do at the Gym or Home

Body exercises are routine activities that we do to keep our bodies healthy. Body exercises keep us fit and healthy by improving our bone and muscle strength, body weight-loss or weight maintenance, heart health and even cognitive health.

Knowing a bunch of moves doesn’t matter as long as one doesn’t know why, how and when to implement them. That’s why many people have not got results that they expect regardless of their commitment to the different types of moves they do in the name of doing exercise. However by the end of this article, you will be able to categorize the various moves that are done while exercising and their respective advantages.

There are four different types of exercise that can be done to achieve a good health state of our bodies and these include; Aerobic (or endurance), strength, flexibility and balance.

Aerobic (Endurance) Exercise
Aerobic exercises increase your breathing and heart rate. These exercises improve the health of your heart, lungs, and circulatory system there by helping you to do the tasks that you need to do every day with ease. Aerobic exercises achieve this by helping to relax blood vessel walls, lowering blood pressure, burning body fat, lowering blood sugar levels, reducing inflammation, boosting mood, and raising "good" HDL cholesterol. Combined with weight loss, it can lower "bad" LDL cholesterol levels, too. Over the long term, aerobic exercise reduces your risk of heart disease, stroke, type 2 diabetes, colon and breast cancers, depression and falls.

If you find yourself out of breathe while trying to walk up a few stairs, it’s a good indicator that you need more aerobic exercise to help condition your heart and lungs, and get enough blood to your muscles to help them work efficiently. Some of the activities you can do are the following;

A brisk walk
Jogging
Climbing the stairs
Playing tennis
Dancing
Biking
Image by Rudy and Peter Skitterians from Pixabay
Doing yard work like raking, digging and gardening
Swimming laps

Strength exercises

These are important for keeping your bones and muscles strong and helping older adults maintain their independence by being able to do everyday activities by themselves at ease. For example; getting up from a chair, climbing stairs, and carrying groceries. Keeping your muscles strong not only makes you stronger, but also stimulates bone growth, lowers blood sugar, assists with weight control, improves balance and posture, and reduces stress and pain in the lower back and joints. It also prevents falls and fall-related injuries. Some examples of strength training include:

Lifting free weights
Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash
Using resistance machines at the gym
Using resistance bands to leverage your own body weight in building strength

Flexibility
Flexibility is very important but much overlooked when people think about exercise. Stretching the muscles routinely makes them longer and more flexible, which increases your range of motion and reduces pain and the risk for injury. This improves your quality of life where by, you’re able to do all the daily activities that require stretching. For example, bending to tie your shoelaces, looking over your shoulder to reverse your car and so many more.

These are some of the activities that one can do to carry out flexibility exercise

Stretching various parts of the body
Doing yoga

Tai chi
Photo by audun munthe on Unsplash

Balance exercises
Practicing and improving balance is important for older adults because it can strengthen the body’s core and help prevent falls. As we get older, the systems that help us maintain balance—our vision, our inner ear, and our leg muscles and joints—tend to break down. However, training your balance can help prevent and reverse these losses.

Here are some good balance exercises:

Heel-to-toe walking
Standing on one foot
Practicing tai chi poses, a “moving meditation” that involves shifting the body slowly, gently, and precisely, while breathing deeply.
Walking on un even surfaces
Squats