Fitness For Mental Health: 3 Key Reasons To Get Active

With the increased consumption of social media, the idea of personal fitness is highly associated with the aesthetic component of building abs, growing your glutes and losing weight. However, there is so much more that regular physical exercise can do for you, that expands beyond physical appearance. There are several benefits of fitness for mental health that need to be highlighted.

3 Key Benefits of Fitness for Mental Health.

Mental health and fitness go hand-in-hand. We’ll explore how regular physical exercise not only enhances physical health but also boosts mental health, improves academic performance, and elevates mood through powerful brain-boosting benefits.

The Impact of Exercise On Your Body

When someone takes part in regular physical exercise, their body begins to use internal systems that impact their:

muscular system
organs
respiratory system
brain chemicals

With exercise, your body begins to increase muscular strength and endurance. When your heart rate increases during exercise, your oxygen intake increases and so your tissues begin to gain more oxygen and nutrients.

This helps your cardiovascular and respiratory systems improve their capacity and efficiency. This leaves you with increased energy to do the things you enjoy and make chores less effortful, so you can navigate life easier.

Exercise and Academic Performance

Did you know that regular physical exercise can help improve your academic performance? There has been extensive research on the impact physical exercise has on the brain. What these studies have discovered is that physical exercise increases brain power.

When you take part in moderate physical exercise, certain parts of the brain are activated. Two of these parts, the basal ganglia and the hippocampus begin to enlarge during physical exercise. Why is that important? These two areas are known to be associated with memory and focus. So how does this help?

Imagine going to class and feeling better equipped to receive the information your instructor is presenting or consider studying for an exam with a larger capacity to store the information you read in your memory. Both these can lead to increased grades when entering an examination. As your grades and energy levels improve, your mood will follow with increased self-esteem, decreased stress and better self-image.

Knowing this, it may seem like a no-brainer to begin regular physical exercise, however, there is more.

Exercise and Mood Enhancement

Regular physical exercise does more to your brain than help you get better grades. As discussed earlier, physical exercise impacts areas of the brain. Beyond increasing memory capabilities and the ability to focus, it also results in stimulating neurotransmitters such as dopamine, noradrenaline and serotonin (Sharma et al., 2006).

These chemicals are considered our happy hormones as they are associated with increasing our mood. Dopamine acts to increase feelings of pleasure, satisfaction and motivation while serotonin plays an important role in mood function, sleep, healing, sexual desire and digestion (Bamalan et al., 2023). When you consider this, it flows logically that physical exercise is often used to help improve anxiety and depression symptoms.

How to Gain These Benefits Of Mental Health And Fitness?

So, what do you need to do to gain these benefits? When we talk about regular physical exercise, we are considering moderate intensity exercise. It should be done least three times a week for 30 minutes to an hour. Movement can be transformative when it comes to mental health.

Although the activities done can differ, interval training has been shown to be an effective way to gain these benefits consistently. By stressing your muscles, heart and lungs at certain intervals make the exercises manageable and allow your strength in all areas increase gradually.

Maximizing Exercise Benefits for Students

If you are a student, scheduling exercise prior to classes or exams is where you will see the best results in terms of increased grades through memory and focus.

At the end of the day, exercise has multiple benefits, it is up to you to utilize them through consistency and determination. For assistance in what to do for exercise, there are plenty of free workout programs online that will not cost you a thing, however, if you would like a personalized approach, hiring a personal trainer can also be beneficial.

Want to learn more about fitness for mental health and how you can start implementing it in your life? Connect with us at Rebound Total Health for accessible counselling online or in person to learn more about how to start focusing on mental health and fitness. For news and educational information, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

References

Bamalan, O.A., Moore, M.J. and Khalili, Y.A. (2023) Physiology, serotonin, StatPearls [Internet]. Available at: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK545168/ (Accessed: 19 October 2024). Sharma, A., Madaan, V. and Petty, F.D. (2006) Exercise for mental health, Primary care companion to the Journal of clinical psychiatry. Available at: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1470658/ (Accessed: 19 October 2024).