What Exercise Will Do For You!

Exercise does so many great things for you, that you may not be aware of them all. Exercise is a simple solution for stress, weight problems, depression, menstrual cramps, boredom, and conditioning of the heart. It builds self-confidence and self esteem and feels great. Most people have two complaints about exercise. It’s boring! It hurts! If you feel that way, it’s probably because you haven’t tried enough different activities to find one that you enjoy. Give yourself and your body a chance to discover that you get more fun from moving then from sitting around. BUT take time to read Teen Health Secrets of course!

Finding a sport is an important start. There two important things to consider when you’re choosing an athletic activity. How much movement does it involve, and how much fun is it for you? The only way exercise can help you is if you enjoy it enough to do it several times a week.

Sports sometimes come into the scene in cycles or fads. You may want to get involved in a particular activity just because it’s the one that everyone else is doing. Going for a popular sport can be a good way to get involved in athletics, but it can also be frustrating, discouraging and sometimes expensive. If something like that happens to you, look around until you find a sport that you can do and one that you will enjoy. Trends don’t last for long, but the effects of a good exercise program do. Also, it may take you a while to discover how good you are at a sport. When you find a sport that appeals to you, you can’t expect to be great when you just start out. Stick with it until you get past that awkward stage to a point where you’re having fun, or until you’re absolutely positive you’ll never catch on. Any sport will have its advantages and disadvantages. You’ll discover on your own what they are for you.

What’s Stopping You?

Some teenagers dislike any exercise. They’ve heard about how much exercise can do for them, but for some reason they don’t get the message. The reason may be that they’ve been getting other messages that make exercise seems pointless, risky, or painful. If you’re not particulate excited about working out – even though you know what a difference it will make in the way you look and feel – maybe you’ve heard too many discouraging words about exercise. Here are a couple of them, as well as reasons you shouldn’t let them stopped you.

“Running or other strenuous exercise is dangerous. You can hurt yourself.”

Sure you can hurt yourself. Some athletes are always turning up with sprains, cuts, strains, dislocations and even fractures. But their injuries don’t come from what they’re doing – they come from the way they do it. They jump in too quickly, take on too much, or keep at it for too long a time.

You can stay safe by warming up before you begin. Stretching helps prevent sprains and strains. If you are new to the sport, don’t try to keep up with friends who have been doing it for years. Build up to their speed gradually. Make sure you have proper equipment and that it fits properly. Safety gear can be expensive, but that bicycle helmet for example, is a lot less expensive than a brain injury. If you get hurt, see your health care provider right away. Never try to “work through an injury” even if your coach advises you to do it. Tell the coach you’d rather wait for your health care provider’s instructions.

Marathons are not for growing bodies. So, they are not the best exercise for teenagers. The10 K is the maximum distance you should run while you are still developing according to most health care providers. Marathons take too much energy and nutrients from young bones and cells that are needed for growth, so you’re better off waiting until you reach your full height. Then you will have energy to spare to cover that distance.

“Exercise has to hurt. No pain, no gain.”

You don’t have to hurt your body to help it, and anyone who says that you do is leading you to trouble. Pain during or after exercise indicates that something is wrong. Either you are overdoing it, or you injured yourself. Listen to your body! All it takes to get something from exercise is effort. Making an effort means getting your body to move faster or work harder it than it does under normal conditions. How much harder? Enough to feel yourself breathing harder (but not losing breath and gasping for air) and to raise your pulse. A high pulse means that your heart is getting a work out too.

Checking Your Pulse

Before you start exercising, check your pulse. You can find your pulse by taking the index and middle fingers of your right hand and pressing them lightly over your left wrist, just below your hand on the left side. Don’t use your thumb to take it, because it has a tiny pulse of its own that will confuse your count. You will need a watch with a second hand to count this, count it for 30 seconds, and then double that number.

Once you’ve found your pulse, register how fast it is moving. You should feel it beat about 70 times in one minute while your body is at rest. Once you’ve been exercising for 10 minutes, pause briefly to check your pulse again. You should feel it thump at least 100 times in one minute. If not, you have to put more effort into your work out until it does. If it is higher than 100, as high as 150 or more you are pushing yourself to hard, so slow down. You will get there soon enough.

What You Can Expect From Exercise

You’ll feel good right away. Exercise works on the part of the brain that determines what kind of mood you’re in. No matter how rotten you feel when you start out, a good run, swim, bike ride, roller blade, or walk will cheer you up. If you’re already feeling good, you’ll even feel better. After a few weeks your body will be firmer and more flexible. Your pulse will be slower when you’re not working out; a sign that your heart is working at a healthier pace. You’ll look better and the difference will start to show in your shape, your face, and your outlook on life.

What You Can’t Expect From Exercise

>You can’t expect to look like models you see in magazines, television and advertisements. Let’s put it this way — if you went to take voice lessons, you might expect your voice to improve, but you wouldn’t expect to sound like your favorite singer. The same goes for your shape, which is exactly how it would should be. You’ll end up with your body in shape — not with the shape of anyone else.

A Work Out That Works

The word exercise covers a lot of different activities, from walking to weight lifting. The best exercise is any kind that keeps her whole body moving for at least 20 minutes, makes you breathe harder than usual, makes you sweat, and gets your heart beating faster. A good exercise routine involves these four things:

• Stretching
• Warming up
• Conditioning
• Cooling down

Stretching
This softens and relaxes your muscles, preparing them to handle the extra stress you put on them during your work out. Well-stretched joints are less likely to strain, sprain, or break. Five minutes of stretching could prevent five weeks in a cast.

Warming up
Before you begin working out full tilt, starts slowly, using the same motions you’ll be using when you’re really exercising. By starting out easy, your giving your blood time to make its way to your muscles. The blood is fuel for those muscles, and if you don’t give it a chance to get to them, they might pooped out on you. That is no fun at all.

Conditioning
This is when you work your body so much that you feel a difference in your pulse rate and in the way you are breathing. During conditioning, you’re working out the most important muscle of all — your heart. Exercise that increases your pulse rate (makes your heart beat faster) is the kind that has all of the benefits mentioned before, like controlling your appetite and making you feel terrific. It also has another benefit. It makes your body burn energy, not just when working out, but afterwards too. This helps you prevent putting on weight. People who don’t get conditioning exercises end up storing much more of what they eat as fat than people who work out often. The reason for this is that muscles which are in good shape from conditioning use of a lot of energy. Fat uses hardly any energy at all, while a muscle at rest needs more calories. That is because muscles perform work, holding your skin firm and helping you move. Here are some examples of conditioning sports:

• Basketball
• Bicycling
• Dancing
• Field hockey
• Gymnastics
• Lacrosse
• Running
• Skating
• Soccer
• Swimming
• Walking quickly

Cooling down
Don’t bring yourself to a sudden stop when you’ve finished your work out. Your body isn’t prepared to quit as quickly as you might be, and a result of a sudden stop could be cramps, dizziness, or even fainting. Slow to a stop by lightly doing whatever activity you’ve been doing at a slower pace. Once you’ve stopped, do a few stretches to complete the cool down.

Warning: Never get into a hot shower until you have cooled down completely. Here’s why: While you’re working out, your blood circulates to the muscles you are using. During your cool down, your blood begins to circulate more evenly throughout your body. Hot water makes the blood come to your skin’s surface. If you get under hot water before you’ve cooled down and have gotten the blood flow back to normal, your blood will be confused. It will rush to your skin, suddenly leaving the rest of you without enough to work normally. You could faint as a result. The shower is not a great place to faint. You could easily crack your skull, break another bone, or drown in the shower. Now that is embarrassing!

How To Get Yourself Motivated

How much you get out of an exercise has a lot to do with how much you enjoy doing it. Here are some suggestions that might make working out more fun for you.

• Get a friend to go along. Working out together and keeping track of each other’s progress can motivate you. Set up an exercise schedule, and reward yourselves for each week that you managed to stick to it.
• Get some special exercise clothes. They don’t have to be the expensive trendy kind, just an outfit that you’re comfortable wearing. Don’t even think about putting it on unless you’re going to be working out.
• If your work out to involves running, biking, blading, or walking, go to somewhere fun like a park or a friend’s house.
• Put off doing something you wanted to until you’ve exercise (writing e-mail, calling friends, eating, watching TV).
• Set goals for yourself. It’s fun to keep track of your progress, and you’ll have more progress to record if you keep each goal just slightly tougher than what you been able to do already. Big goals can be discouraging, and — if they involve pushing yourself much harder than usual — they can be dangerous.

Choosing a Goal

There are four types of goals you can choose from:

Distance goals	You can challenge yourself to go further than you’ve gone before.
Speed goals	You can see if you can move faster than before.
Endurance goals	You can see if you can last longer – spend more time in motion.
Repetition goals	You can challenge yourself to repeat an exercise more than you have before. For example, try for 40 sit-ups if you’ve been doing 30.

Life In Motion: Get Your Body Involved

The kind of exercise you get from sports and athletics is just one type of movement that’s important to the way you grow, look, and feel. The other is movement you work into your daily life by walking instead of taking a car rides, climbing stairs instead of riding the elevator, and generally using your body instead of relying on vehicles and appliances to transport you and take care of certain tasks. Not that you should revert to the Stone Age! There will always be times when it won’t make sense to try to get somewhere without a ride. But there will also be plenty of times when you wouldn’t be sacrificing anything and in fact, would be gaining a great deal, by getting more movement into your life. The greatest benefit is that you will stay in good shape. Your body will get better with use, so the more you use it each day, the more it improves.

And another thing, you will want to stay in shape! As you depend more and more on your body, you’ll realize that it works and feels best when its rested, well nourished, and exercised.

Fitness Is For Everyone!

If you have a disabling condition or disease of any kind, you need exercise just as much as anyone else. Regardless of your problem, you can benefit from regular workouts. Almost every day, people who have suffered paralysis, undergone an amputation, or been diagnosed with chronic disease break through athletic barriers, proving to others who share their condition that their problem is not necessarily an obstacle to general fitness.

How much of what kind of activity take up depends on your particular condition and the kind of medication it may be taking for it. Your health care provider should be in on any decision about starting an exercise program, and to provide guidance and encouragement. If your health care provider warns you against exercise, see if another provider will offer you different advice.

Be Confident
Some people let self-consciousness keep them from working out. They think that their physical difference makes them look or act funny, and that others will stare and laugh at them. Although there are always insensitive people who might behave that way, they are relatively few compared with the many who admire anyone willing to work at fitness. Keep in mind that the kinds of people who make fun are the ones with the real disabilities. Self-consciousness can also be a problem if you have to ask others for help while you are preparing to exercise — if you need assistance getting into the pool for example, or getting in and out of the shower.

Surprise Symptoms
Another obstacle for some is unpredictable symptoms. With some diseases you never know when it might flare up. If you have diabetes, epilepsy, or asthma, you may have to deal with this. If you have one of these conditions, and you’re involved in a team sport, make sure that your coach and at least one teammate know how to recognize your symptoms and understand what to do if they flare in order to help you. You might feel weird about bringing it up, but you will feel even worse if something happened and you had left them unprepared. Always have your inhaler, or other medication available if you need it. If you tell about it with confidence, in a way that lets them know you are not frightened or humiliated, they won’t be scared or embarrassed, either.

It takes practice, patience, and familiarity with your body to get control of a chronic illness. You can help yourself by cooperating with your health care provider, taking the appropriate medications in the proper amounts and the right times, and keeping your body as fit as you’re able with an exercise program you truly enjoy.

Problem Parents
Parents of kids with disabilities or chronic diseases often react in one of two ways:

They become overprotective and warn you not to move a muscle. They’re scared of the risks they see in sports. Or they pretend there’s no problem and push you into every conceivable form of athletics just to prove that their kid is “okay”.

Unless they’ve discussed it with your health care provider, and he or she has agreed that you’re too timid about exercise, your parents are not qualified to make those decisions for you. Only you and your health care provider can determine what and how much you can and should be doing.

It is important for you as well as your family to remember that just because people with physical disabilities are participating in marathons, mountain-climbing expeditions, and other challenging athletic adventures, it doesn’t mean that you have to push yourself to similar extremes. Just because you can do it, in other words, doesn’t mean you have to do it. There is no reason why an exercise program for you should be any more demanding than one for others who don’t have that extra challenge.

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Make sure to Stretch before and after exercise to help reduce injury and improve flexibility!

~ Exercise And Enjoy ~

You have found hint #2… , Next is a habit you may want to stop.