Running has many health benefits, including losing weight, Feeling better and being healthier, Building muscles, and good mood. Here are 8 health benefits of running — backed by science.
1. Lose weight
Actually, there is one very simple equation when it comes to losing weight – and that is that you have to consume fewer calories than you burn.
When you eat food, your body absorbs the nutrients to help support various processes in the body and it absorbs glucose in order to provide useable energy. That glucose moves around the bloodstream and when you move, breathe or run it is sent to muscles and organs in order to give you the power you need.
But what if you are just lying around and you’re left with energy left over? In that case, the sugar is converted into fat and is stored around the body under the skin. This is what makes us look less attractive and what can also cause numerous health problems.
On the other hand, if you need more energy that is available to you, then your body will have to look toward its existing fat stores. It will then put you in an aerobic state, meaning that oxygen will be sent to the fat stores and break down the fat to provide you with more energy.
All this happens on a moment-to-moment basis but the best way for us to monitor it is to look at our daily total. That means we need to look at our daily calorie intake and our daily calorie burn in order to work out the difference.
What you’ll be left with is either a ‘calorie deficit’ or a ‘calorie surplus. A surplus means that you have leftover energy that the body is going to store as fat. A deficit means that you used more than you burned, so you will have removed some of your fat. It’s a little like writing a budget but instead of trying to save money, you’re trying to lose calories.
So where does running fit in? It actually plays an important role for all kinds of reasons but the most simple and straightforward to understand is this: running burns a lot of calories. In fact, a forty-minute run will help you to burn something like 500-800 calories. That’s a huge amount and more than you could probably burn with any other form of exercise.
And to put this in perspective, most people will naturally aim to consume around 2,000-2,500 calories in a day. That means that running for just one hour can burn somewhere between 1/2 and 1/3rd of your total calorie count. That’s a big difference and it’s enough to make a significant impact even just twice a week.
2. Feeling better and being healthier
Obviously, running improves your cardiovascular fitness and your energy. It’s not just your heart that improves, it’s also your mitochondria and all the other energy systems in your body. This means, quite simply, that you get tired less easily. That’s true whether you’re playing sports or you’re on a long walk. Bruce Lee used to run for miles every single day and the reason he gave for this was that you can’t expect to be a good fighter if you’re tired out after throwing just a few punches! The same is true for tennis, for football, rugby…
And even just a busy day or stressful commute. When you can run 10 miles, suddenly everything else becomes really easy.
Wouldn’t you love it if everything was really easy?
3. Increase the size of your left ventricle
The first thing it does is to increase the size of your left ventricle. This is the part of your heart that stores oxygenated blood and then pumps it around your body. The stronger and larger this gets, the more blood you can transport around your body with fewer heartbeats. This is a benefit that is exclusive to steady-state cardio-like running.
What that increased left ventricle means is that you can now deliver more oxygen and nutrients to your body at any given time. That doesn’t only mean when you’re running but also when you’re sleeping and when you’re working. This means you’ll wake up each morning feeling more energetic and you’ll be able to stay awake and alert for longer during the day.
4. Lower Resting Heart Rate (RHR)
Likewise, that increased power in your heart also means your pulse doesn’t have to work so hard. Instead of going into overdrive to try and pump your blood around your body, your heart can take a much more casual approach and still provide more than enough of what you need, where you need it.
What does this mean? It means that you now have a lower Resting Heart Rate (RHR). That is important because a low resting heart rate is correlated with low cortisol – cortisol being the stress hormone. In other words, when your heart is healthy, you are less physiologically aroused at all times of the day. That means that you will feel much more refreshed and much more rested even when you’re not really doing anything. It means you’ll be able to handle stressful life events much easier and it means that you’ll sleep FAR better (your sleep quality is measured largely by how low your heart rate drops).
This also means your blood pressure will be lower (because blood pressure is a result of the viscosity of your blood and the force of your heart pumping). That, in turn, means you’re much less likely to suffer a heart attack, stroke, or other incident associated with high blood pressure. When you combine this with lower body weight, you become generally much less likely to become ill or to suffer any kind of serious attack.
Oh and that lowered cortisol means that you’ll experience higher testosterone. For guys, this means that you’ll be able to see more muscle mass and more fat loss. A lot of people stay away from running because they think it will make them skinny and it will make them burn muscle. We mentioned ‘myostatin’ earlier and indeed this is a compound that causes the breakdown of muscle.
5. Makes you more anabolic
BUT (and this is a big but), running also makes you more anabolic the rest of the time by helping you to rest more efficiently. That means that it can actually boost muscle mass. And this is greatly enhanced by the increased testosterone that correlated with an improved heart rate variability.
6. Building muscles
For men and women alike, running is actually also a very good way to build muscle mass in the legs. This is attractive in and of itself but it also leads to yet more fat loss and yet more muscle-building (this is why we’re told never to skip leg day!).
Women wanting to get ‘fitness model’ type physiques really NEED to run. Because you don’t lose cellulite by losing fat – you lose it by toning up. If you start running, then you will have a much firmer and more toned set of buttocks.
7. Good mood
All these changes have amazing impacts on your mood. This is what happens when you lower the stress hormone and start getting the body you’ve always wanted! But it’s also what happens when you experience the ‘runner’s high’. Running triggers the release of endorphins which are nature’s natural antidepressants and analgesics. They kill pain and they make you feel elated like nothing else.
This is compounded by the fact that running allows you to explore your natural area and usually involves running through naturally beautiful locations. That might mean a nearby forest or it might be a park – either way, countless studies have shown that spending more time in nature further reduces stress and even improves creativity. If you spend most of your time in a noisy, dirty, and polluted urban environment, then this is a great way to get an ‘escape’ and feel a lot better about it! This is quickly becoming a health fad that some people refer to as ‘bathing in nature. For me, one of the best parts of running is just getting to explore my local area!
8. Improve personal record
And that’s nothing compared with the incredible sense of achievement that you get from beating personal bests. Running is one of the purest forms of self-improvement and an excellent chance to challenge and test yourself. You’ll be constantly pushing yourself further and harder and it’s a fantastic way to develop mental resolve and resilience. When you’re a runner, nothing can pose an insurmountable challenge anymore. You start to learn that you just have to keep going a little further to cross that finish line. So it is with running and so it is with every other challenge life throws at you.
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