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How Exercise Benefits Whole Body Health

How Exercise Benefits Whole Body Health

You know that exercise is key to helping you build a strong, flexible and mobile body. Along with eating a balanced diet, getting adequate sleep, and avoiding smoking – a daily exercise habit is one of the best things you can do for your health. However, many of us simply associate exercise and its benefits with our physical bodies. We read articles about how lifting weights can make us stronger, how yoga keeps us flexible, and how running or cycling will help support our heart health. Often overlooked in these articles is how exercise benefits your whole-body health. Not only does exercise build your physical muscles, it also has tremendous benefits for your whole body health. From your brain health, digestive health, mental health, immune system health, and overall ability to withstand health hazards such as illness, chronic stress, or physical stressors such as falls, accidents, and day-to-day living – exercise is your go-to support system. The thing about exercise is that it has a negative reputation. Too many of us associate exercise with grueling high school gym classes or as something we have to do rather than something we want to do. As part of the SierraSil vision to see one million or more people live healthier and more active lives, we want to help you understand how exercise benefits you – inside and out.

How Exercise Benefits Your Entire Body

Beyond supporting your joints and giving you the muscular support to easily bend your knees, carry groceries, and play a game of tennis, exercise has so many trickle-down impacts that once you realize how great exercise is for your entire body, you’ll be hooked on making it a daily practice.
  • Brain boosting chemicals: your brain on exercise is pretty incredible. From releasing feel-good endorphins to boost your mood to helping alleviate feelings of anxiety and depression, exercise also helps stimulate the production of brain-deprived neurotrophic factor (BDNF). BDNF is a powerful brain chemical that stimulates the growth of brain cells. Exercise is primarily effective in supporting and encouraging the growth of brain cells in your hippocampus – the part of your brain responsible for memory.
  • Stress reduction: getting out for a brisk walk, run, weight-lifting session, or game of basketball is a great way to manage your stress levels. Exercise gives you a much-needed break from the stressors of work and home life. Just knowing that at the end of a busy work day, you have a yoga class or hockey game to look forward to, can make it easier to get through your day. Scientifically speaking, exercise increases the level of norepinephrine, a chemical that helps moderate your brain response to stress, helping you better deal with mental stressors.
  • Memory support: it’s a proven fact, as you age, your memory does decline. That feeling of walking into a room and forgetting why you’re in the room or forgetting long-remembered phone numbers or the onset of dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. The aging process and diseases like Alzheimer’s actually kill of brain cells, causing your brain to shrink and lose important brain functions. Exercise cannot cure dementia or Alzheimer’s disease, but it can help slow the brain degeneration that happens after the age of 45.
  • Sleep and relaxation support: sleep is so critical to your ability to recharge, recover and be ready for the next day. Serving triple duty, exercise helps you relieve stress, helps you fight depression and anxiety and in turn makes it easier for you to let go and relax. At its most basic, exercise helps you tire out your body, making it easier for you to sleep and even take afternoon naps.
  • Self-confidence booster: think of how great you feel after you’ve gone for a run or met up with friends for hike in the woods. There is a feeling of accomplishment for setting a goal and achieving it and this activity gives you confidence in your body. You know that your body can support you in your activity and exercise goals and routines. There are of course the feelings that come when you like what you see in the mirror – let’s not forget that exercise does help you build muscles and maintain a healthy body weight.
  • Inspiration for others: have you ever watched the end of an Ironman triathlon or your local marathon? You see regular people, just like you, achieving overwhelming athletic and mental success. There is something special that happens when you see or read about a person who has overcome challenges and stayed focus on their exercise or sport-related goal. Now think of how you can do this for others – it might not seem like a big deal, but your daily walk can inspire your friends and family to be more active and healthy.
  • Problem solving and deep thinking: a walk, run, swim, cycle or weight work-out can do wonders for clearing your mind and help you get into a deep thinking and problem-solving mode. Many people use their daily exercise routine to help them work through challenges and even to tap into their creativity.
  • Immune system health: your immune system is key to protecting you from toxins, viruses, bacteria and illness. When you exercise you strengthen your heart, help flush bacteria out of your lungs and airways, change the antibodies and white blood cells to help your immune system better detect disease, and slow the release of stress hormones.
  • Joint health support: your joints are supported by muscles, tendons, ligaments, and other fibers. The stronger these supporting fibers, the more support you’re able to give to your knees, elbows, wrists, hips, ankles, back, and other joints. This makes it easier for you to move your body, develop joint health, and manage the impacts of conditions such as arthritis.
  • Social community: it’s very easy to become disconnected from friends and your social community. You go to work, come home, watch some television and repeat this daily. By joining a sports team or participating in a regular exercise group, you’re extending and broadening your social community, making it easier to make friends and feel connected to your community. This social community is super important to you overall mental and emotional health – we all need friends to talk to, hang out with, walk with, and rely on when we’re struggling.
Visit the SierraSil Facebook community and tell us how you’re going to move and exercise every day. Remember, this exercise doesn’t need to be exhausting – it should be something you can do daily and look forward to doing. Think of ways you can easily incorporate daily exercise into your routine: a walk at the end of the work day, taking the stairs instead of the elevator, getting involved with coaching your children’s sports team, joining a tennis club, taking out a membership at your local yoga studio, or getting out for a bike ride. There are so many ways you can make exercise a part of your daily life – the rewards are endless. We guarantee you’ll feel good about this new habit.

A Different Spin on New Year’s Resolutions

A Different Spin on New Year’s Resolutions

It’s the start of another new year. A time to set big goals and to maybe makes some changes in your lifestyle. Many of us set New Year’s resolutions that come with big sacrifices or demand massive changes to our current lifestyle – making these resolutions not only difficult but practically impossible. However, challenging these resolutions are, the one thing they do in the short-term is give us hope and anticipation in a time when we’re experiencing the holiday let-down. The holiday let-down or post-holidays blues is a real part of life for many of us, so these resolutions we set, regardless of the unlikelihood of achieving them, do give us something to strive towards. Now you can Google “the benefits of New Year’s resolutions” and come up with pages and pages of search results in favor of and against resolutions. And yes, we see both sides to the arguments for and against setting New Year’s resolutions – so we want to think about this in a different way. Instead of setting big goals that are tied to a specific outcome, it’s time to think of how you want to feel and what you want to experience during this new year. When we switch our focus from actual results to the act of doing or performance, it becomes much easier and possible to be successful. In this blog post, we take a different look at New Year’s resolutions, one that we hope can help set you up for good mental and physical health through-out the year.

 

Put an End to Wholesale Change

We’ve all done it at the start of the new year- we’ve taken a look in the mirror and decided we need to change everything. This means we throw all our efforts into make every day different and supposedly better than last year. Eating better, cutting out junk food, exercising every day, going to bed earlier, being more productive at work, calling our friends, writing letters, volunteering more, and just generally doing everything perfectly. This type of resolution hasn’t worked out so great. In fact, it sets you up for complete and total failure. The major problem with resolution setting is that we simply ask and expect too much of ourselves. For some reason, we have attached January 1st as the day when we’ll have the willpower, motivation, and gumption to do everything better. So, the first thing you need to do for 2019 is to drop this idea that you can give yourself a complete makeover. This is too much to ask of yourself.

 

How to Set New Year’s Resolutions

When you set or think about your new year’s resolutions the best thing you can do is drop the word “should”. For example, I should lose 10 lbs. by February 15th, I should run for one hour seven days a week, or I should cook every meal at home and stop eating out. The problem with these statements is that they put a lot of pressure on you to do more, be better, and to accomplish very challenging goals – with zero room for flexibility. The first few days might go great but then real life gets in the way and it becomes too hard to stick to the new rigid expectations you’ve placed on yourself. The end result being that you give up on your resolutions – and feel like a failure. Do the following to set New Year’s resolutions that you can feel good about:
  • Make a list of all the things that made you happy last year. From this list, what do you want to do more of this year? Maybe you really enjoyed meeting up with your Tuesday night run club, so find out if the group meets on Saturdays and add in a second group run each week. Or maybe you really enjoyed hosting your book club get together, so look for other ways you can have friends over for casual get togethers. These kinds of resolutions are achievable because they’re activities that give you pleasure and don’t have sacrifice tied to them.
  • Think of five things you’d like to accomplish this year. These can be anything such as: learning a new language, losing weight, being more active while living with arthritis, or travelling more. You can see that these are very broad accomplishments – to make them doable, break them down into small tangible steps that you can actually accomplish.
  • Dream big and write down your huge pie-in-the-sky goals. Now, choose one and start chipping away at how you can accomplish this goal. Maybe your big goal is to hike the Appalachian Trail – so start small with joining a local hiking group, then going for overnight hikes, weekend-long hikes, and slowly building from there until you’ve given yourself the experiences, knowledge, and tools that you need to accomplish your ultimate goal.
It’s important to remember that there is no such thing as an overnight success. The athletes you see setting world records or the entrepreneurs who sell their companies for millions didn’t find success in a mere 31 days. It took years of focus, failure, dedication, reframing, and flexibility to get where they are today. You are no different. Your New Year’s resolutions can work if you set them up to be connected to making you feel good about yourself. So, what do you really want to do this year? What will make you feel good and give you a deep feeling of satisfaction? Remember, one of the best ways to realize success is to have community support – so don’t be shy, share your goals and dreams for the year with us on our Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram communities. Chances are high you’ll connect with another SierraSil community member who has similar goals and you can support one another through-out the year.

How To Keep Balance In Your Life

How To Keep Balance In Your Life

The holiday season is here. This means you’re busy. Really busy. Many of us thrive on being busy, but when the busyness takes over, it can be hard to keep balance in your life. For some reason, it happens every holiday season – you vow that this year will be different but before you know it, you’re busy every evening and even double-booked on the weekends. Add in shopping for gifts, planning holiday meals, and making travel plans – and you’re stretched quite thin. Suddenly your gym routine, Sunday family supper, evening walks, book club meetings, and afternoon nap are replaced with holiday busyness. Well, this year, we want you to stick to your vow – and make sure that this holiday season is balanced. This balance is super critical for your health and wellness. Skipping out on your regular tennis game or cancelling your evening walk with friends not only impacts your joint health but also your emotional health. Remember, the holiday season can be stressful, and you need time to yourself to manage the stress and emotional drain that comes during the holidays. In this article, we give you some tips on how you can keep balance in your life during the holidays (and through-out the year). We share these tips as part of the SierraSil company vision of helping one million or more people live healthier and more active lives.

Just Say No

Practice saying it out loud. Say the word “no” and then say it again. See, nothing terrible happened. There is nothing wrong with saying no. You can’t do everything and be everywhere. This means you have to say no and mean it when you say it. Think about what is important to you during the holiday season and keep this in mind when you’re asked to help out, attend a party, bake some cookies, or go on a shopping spree – be ready to say no to the offers that don’t mesh with your holiday priorities.

Plan and Prepare

Your gym workouts, morning walks, or evening basketball games are important to you. So, make sure that you stick to these activities during the holiday season. Plan ahead and make sure you’re not giving up your regular fitness routine or evening out with friends because of a holiday event. It’s especially important that you don’t miss out on your priority activities for holiday commitments that you’re not that interested in. If you’re going to miss a yoga session or book club night – make sure it’s for something very important to you. Remember, regular exercise and time with friends is important for your physical health and emotional well-being.

Be Picky

There are only seven days in a week. There are only 24 hours in each day. Think of these numbers when you’re crowding your calendar with numerous holiday events and activities. It might just be a quick trip to the local craft show but when you try to squeeze this in between doing groceries, baking holiday treats for the potluck, and decorating the tree – suddenly you haven’t got a lot of time left. So be picky. Choose the events, activities, and people that are most important to you. You cannot please everyone or do everything.

Keep Smiling

When you smile, you instantly feel better. Just the simple act of a smile can be contagious and make those around you feel better. Better yet, laugh out loud. You’ll feel fantastic and others will smile just by hearing you laugh. When the mall is crowded, and you can’t find a parking spot or when you can’t find that crucial ingredient in the overly busy grocery store – smile. Take a moment to ask a stranger how their day is going. Hold the door open, offer to help someone with their bags - spread small acts of kindness to others. This, after all is what the holidays are really all about.

Remember the Reasons Why

Why are you rushing from store-to-store or baking cookies at midnight or searching online for that perfect ornament or trying to attend three parties in one evening? Why are you making yourself tired and stressed out? Think about the spirit of the holiday season. Is this rushing and stress really what the holidays are supposed to be about? To help you slow down and focus on what makes you feel best during the holidays, jot down the names of the people most important to you and note how you’ll make them feel special this holiday season. This is your priority for the holidays.

Make Some Me Time

That walk, yoga class, knitting group, backgammon game night, and swimming session are all about you. This is a good thing. Make sure you don’t skimp out on this me time during the holidays. You need this time to keep yourself supported, soothed, and happy. This is what balance is all about. Finding and making the time you need each day to enjoy the activities and people that make you feel your best. When you’re able to maintain this through-out the holidays, you’ll be happier, less stressed, and actually enjoy the holidays more because you won’t regret missing out on your favorite activities.

Wishing You the Best

We want you to have a healthy and active holiday season. There is nothing better than spending time with your loved ones. Stop for a moment and take it all in – savor this special time and never take it for granted. The entire SierraSil team wishes you the very best this holiday season.