The Physical Benefits of Exercise in Promoting Muscle Building, Strengthening Lung and Maintaining Muscle Health

Strong muscular function is the clearest requirement for exercise, and enhanced muscular ability is the most obvious benefit of regular exercise. Obvious or not, there is extra to your muscles than meets the eye.

Similar to all living tissue, muscle cells require oxygen; they get it from a rich network of tiny blood vessels called capillaries. They also need power which is produced by thousands of tiny factories called mitochondria. The mitochondria are packed with enzymes that convert glucose (sugar) from the blood into energy; they can also generate energy from glycogen (a starch) stored right in the muscles themselves, and they can burn fat.

Muscles improve with regular use, but the type of exercise you perform determines the type of improvement. Exercises such as walking or biking increase your muscles' blood supply, energy stores, and mitochondrial activity. The result is better oxygen uptake and a much more efficient metabolism; you'll recognize it as improved endurance. In contrast, exercises such as weight lifting increase the size and power of individual muscle cells, increasing the bulk and strength of your muscles. Whereas your circulation and metabolism will benefit when you use any part of your body, individual muscles improve only when they are put to work. In addition, as muscles become stronger, they get shorter and tighter. You can overcome both problems by planning a balanced program that includes regular stretching.

When you exercise, your breathing gets deeper and faster. If you push yourself to the limit, you'll be panting and gasping for air. As you get into shape, you'll be able to do much more exercise with less respiratory effort—you'll "get your wind." Surprisingly, though, your lungs don't deserve any of the credit. In fact, the lung is one of the few human organs that does not improve with exercise training. The reason: your lungs have such a large excess capacity that they do not have to improve to meet the demands of exercise. In fact, you could get along perfectly well with just one lung, even getting enough oxygen to permit vigorous exercise. Intense exercise produces breathlessness because tissues aren't getting enough oxygen and they are producing excessive amounts of carbon dioxide and acid. Regular exercise improves your wind without changing your lungs because it boosts your heart's ability to pump oxygen-rich blood and it enhances your muscles' ability to extract and use that oxygen.

Your bones are much more than passive supporting structures like the girders on a high-rise. Your body's 206 bones are metallically active living tissues. Even after you've stopped growing, your bones are constantly reconstructing themselves by resorbing old bone and forming new tissue. At any one time, about seven percent of your body's bone is being remodeled.

During youth, bone formation outpaces bone resorption— that's how we grow. In our twenties and thirties, the two processes are balanced and bones are at their strongest, containing about two and a half pounds of calcium in the average adult. But beyond age forty or so, bone tissue is removed faster than it is restored; in particular, menopause accelerates the net loss of bone calcium in women. In about thirty-four million Americans, the result is osteopenia (low bone calcium), and in another ten million, the result is osteoporosis, a potentially debilitating disorder which is characterized by thin, brittle bones that tend to fracture quite easily. You can help keep your bones strong by getting enough calcium and vitamin D in your diet and by staying away from tobacco and excessive amounts of alcohol. And exercise helps by slowing the rate of bone resorption. But to strengthen your bones, you'll need special types of exercises, weight-bearing and/or resistance exercise.
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