Fitness And Disease Prevention

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Can exercise reduce the risk of disease?

With fitness and disease prevention, exercise can reduce your risk of disease. The very common diseases that we struggle with in America are obesity, stroke, and heart disease. All of these are significantly impacted by an exercise program; an aerobic exercise program will significantly decrease your risk for any of those diseases. The immune system is influenced by many different things in our lives. It’s influenced by hormones inside our body, our diet, our environment, chemicals we are exposed to, and exercise. We know that a regular exercise routine improves your immune system and will elevate the level of immune fighting cells within your body, therefore helping to prevent diseases.

How are weight problems connected to diabetes?

Diabetes and obesity or overweight are directly related with each other. If you are overweight or obese, your risk of developing diabetes is much, much higher. And once you develop diabetes, then you’ll start developing the complications of diabetes. You can decrease your risk of developing diabetes by making sure that you eat appropriately, that you’re not overeating, that you’re not getting too much sugar in your body, and you help burn the sugar that’s in your body by exercising. Those people that participate in a regular aerobic exercise program three times a week and have an appropriate diet are at far less risk for developing diabetes, and of heart disease, and of a stroke.

How can exercise help me if I have osteoporosis?

Osteoporosis is the development of de-mineralization of your bones. This happens in both men and women as they age with changes in their hormone levels, and the ability to deposit the appropriate minerals in the bone is diminished. There are good medications to treat this, but exercise is also part of the treatment for osteoporosis. The muscles in your body are attached to the bones in your body, and by using those muscles, you actually put pressure on the bones, and that pressure on the bones stimulates the deposit of calcium and minerals into the bones, help keeping those bones healthy, and then, of course, decreasing the risk of you developing fractures.

How does exercise help fight rheumatoid arthritis?

Rheumatoid arthritis is an immunological pathology that attacks the joints in the body. There are specific joints that are more at risk, but many joints of the body can be affected by R Rheumatoid arthritis A. It ultimately, over time, begins to degrade the tissues within a joint, and so the problems that people have with Rheumatoid arthritis is the pain within the joint and the limited range of motion. When the joints in your body become so limited by the pain and the loss of range motion then, of course, your physical activities really begin to suffer. And as you use the joints less and less because of the pain and the lack of range of motion, then they become even stiffer. It’s a vicious cycle, so the goal of treatment is to stop that that spiral down cycle by trying to maintain some range of motion and trying to treat the pain and keeping the strength in the muscles that surround that joint. So that an exercise program needs to be designed very specifically for each individual with Rheumatoid arthritis. I would design a program differently from patient to patient depending on what joints are affected in that patient. But there is one thing that’s always true in an exercise for somebody with Rheumatoid arthritis, and that is that it has to be exercise that is not impacting upon the joint.

Can exercise help me quit smoking?

Smoking cessation, or quitting smoking is a very, very challenging thing to do, and there’s no one treatment that works for everybody. So what you want to do is you want to use several different techniques, and one of those is exercise. You will occupy your time, it will help motivate you, you will feel betterphysically. Often, when people quit smoking, they feel much worse before they actually feel better, so part of treating that would be an exercise program. There’s also healing that has to happen in the lungs because of the damage that is done by smoking. We want to promote the healing of your lungs, and you can smoke a certain amount for a certain number of years and still be able to reverse that damage that has been done in your lungs, and part of that would be exercising. An aerobic exercise program within your physical abilities, if you are limited because of your breathing, then you’ll have to do a progressive exercise program, and this is something a physician can help you design – how do you start out, and how are you going to build your physical abilities, given your lung capacity limitations.

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