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Anyone who has done some level of activity before – whether that be walking or lifting weights – will know that exercising affects how your body feels.
It's common to experience an increase in breathing rate and heart rate, plus your body may feel warmer. Depending on the type of exercise, you may have also experienced aching muscles or that burning sensation when performing repetitions of an exercise as your muscles start to fatigue.
The question is, do you know why these things happen during exercise? To help answer that, here's a little guide to what is happening inside your body to your brain, muscles, lungs and heart when you exercise.
Note: click on the circles at the top of the box to scroll through the guide
As you can see, there's a lot of work going on to create the movement required to exercise. The above processes require energy, which is why we burn more calories when we exercise. They also place demand on our muscle fibres, lungs and heart which is what leads to the adaptations that make us fitter.
Within our cells we have little organelles called mitochondria, which use oxygen and nutrients to produce ATP. It's adaptations in the efficiency and number of mitochondria in our cells that lead to us becoming fitter over time. The need for more energy from exercise results in the body creating more mitochondria to meet this demand. When we have more mitochondria, we can use oxygen and create energy more efficiently, meaning our heart and lungs don't have to work as hard for the same activity going forward. This enables us to work at a higher intensity and for longer durations. Over time as our body becomes more efficient at providing oxygen and producing energy, our exercise performance improves.
As well as this, our heart strength improves with regular exercise because it's a muscle – and like any other muscle, it gets stronger the more it is worked!
Understanding the science behind exercise helps us to appreciate what an incredible machine our body is! It should inspire us to do the very best we can to take care of ourselves, our heart in particular. Even just a small amount of activity is better than nothing. So forget the all or nothing mentality, your body will thank you for anything you can do – little and often is way more beneficial than the occasional big workout.
Emma White (Certified Personal Trainer) has always loved fitness. She's passionate about the many benefits of regular exercise, particularly the positive impact on mental health and overall quality of life, as well as how it provides the key to successful weight management.
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