Working Out Helps You Work it Out

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Going for a walk can help you settle down your overactive brain and help you see things positively, and best of all it’s free! Anxiety and depression rates are increasing in North America for a variety of legitimate reasons; however, we a little working out can bring those rates down. A very effective treatment for anxiety and depression is to use your body and workout. There’s no a growing movement in the english speaking world to get medical professionals prescribe exercise as part of a treatment plan.

“Physical activity can be an effective treatment for mental health problems,” says Ben Singh, lead author and research fellow at the University of South Australia. He thinks it works in several ways: by releasing endorphins and boosting our mood, improving sleep, reducing stress, supporting self-esteem and confidence, and making us feel accomplished and purposeful.

The findings suggest that exercise is particularly helpful in certain situations. While the type of exercise didn’t matter, people got more mental health benefits out of higher-intensity exercise. If you’re doing something that makes you breathe hard, in other words, that’s a good sign.

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This Breathing Exercise is Better Than Normal Exercise

People suffering from low blood pressure may soon have an easier time exercising to keep their pressure at the proper level thanks to a handheld device. Researchers have found a technique that is more efficient than traditional exercise. Patients can keep their blood level at a safe level by practicing a breathing technique known as High-Resistance Inspiratory Muscle Strength Training (IMST). Basically the exercise helps strengthen the of the diaphragm by providing some resistance. Of course, there are still many benefits to just going for a walk.

Results show participants in the IMST group saw their systolic blood pressure fall by an average of nine points. That kind of improvement, researchers say, is generally better than what high blood pressure patients see from walking 30 minutes a day five days a week. The study finds the IMST results are even on par with certain blood pressure-lowering drugs prescribed to patients.

Perhaps more importantly, study authors find people doing IMST saw their blood pressure continue to stay low even after they stopped the breathing workouts for six weeks. “We found not only is it more time-efficient than traditional exercise programs, the benefits may be longer lasting,” says Craighead.

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Active People Naturally Crave Healthier Foods

Want to eat healthier but lacking motivation? Start being more active and you’ll find that picking healthier foods will get easier. A least that’s what participants found in a recent study, and there’s no reason to expect different results for you. Researchers took people who had a sedentary lifestyle and just asked them to workout a little. Without instructions the participants started to eat healthier just because they were more active.

“The process of becoming physically active can influence dietary behavior,” said Molly Bray, corresponding author of the paper and chair of the Nutritional Sciences department at UT Austin and a pediatrics faculty member at Dell Medical School. “One of the reasons that we need to promote exercise is for the healthy habits it can create in other areas. That combination is very powerful.”

“Many people in the study didn’t know they had this active, healthy person inside them,” Bray said. “Some of them thought their size was inevitable. For many of these young people, they are choosing what to eat and when to exercise for the first time in their lives.”

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There are Benefits to Long Commutes

Long commutes feel like a slog, but there are benefits to sitting on a train and staring out the window everyday. Londoners have some of the longest commutes in Europe which has led to some neat research into the benefits of these long and regular journeys. On the way to and from work people are able to contemplate their work-life and have a clear separation between work and home. Another, more obvious, benefit is that people who take public transit to work are healthier than those who drive.

To find out more, Richard Patterson at Imperial College London analysed detailed data from the English National Travel Survey, allowing him to determine exactly how much exercise the average commuter gleans from their daily journey. He found that roughly a third of public transport commuters met the government’s recommendations of 30-minutes exercise a day, through their commute alone.

Patterson points out that governments could consider these benefits when they decide their funding for transport networks, since encouraging people to give up their cars and take a train or bus could end up having a real effect on public health. In the UK, for instance, he calculates that a 10% increase in the use of public transport could result in 1.2 million more people reaching the recommended levels of physical activity. “Some decisions, which may not seem to have much to do with health, can have these knock-on effects for people’s wellbeing,” he says.

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Lift the Weight of Depression by Lifting Weights

Any physical movement is good for you and the evidence keeps piling up. A meta-analysis of the relationship between resistance exercise training (RET) and depression concludes that lifting weights does indeed help your mental health. Because studies usually look at only aspect of mental health we need more research looking across studies to provide a solid foundation and that’s what we’re seeing here.

One thing I realized when going to the gym is that it took weeks to get that positive feeling from working out. Don’t expect instance levity in your mood or skills. There’s no reason to start at the extreme by lifting way more than you can. Start with lighter weights and slowly work your way up to whatever you like.

After reviewing the literature, Gordon and team found that regardless of age, sex, or health status, RET is “associated with a significant reduction in depressive symptoms.” The largest gains were found in adults with elevated symptoms, which gave the researchers hope that RET “may be particularly helpful for reducing depression symptoms in people with greater depressive symptoms.” They also found that supervised workout sessions resulted in larger gains than in unsupervised sessions.

As Gordon says, it’s impossible to blind people for this sort of research—you know who is lifting weights and who is not. As with most studies, the placebo effect could be at work. But given all we know about the benefits of exercise, this is a placebo with few side effects (overexertion and muscle strains being the most prominent). The benefits outweigh any potential risk.

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