boiMAG.com "Fitness"

FITNESS Stay In Shape, Get Fit and Stay Healthy

RunRepeat’s 2021 fitness trends report showed that 59.1% of active adults chose outdoor activities as their go-to way to stay fit. Whether it’s walking, hiking, mountain biking, or trail running, outdoor fitness will remain a popular fitness trend in 2022.

“Outdoor exercise, like biking and roller skating, are going to remain popular, E-bikes, in particular, are great for older adults because they allow them to go farther distances with less effort.”

Last summer, some fitness studios and gyms also hosted outdoor fitness classes, and these classes will continue during the warmer months.

The last few years has forced many to consider where and how they can work out outdoors. Whether you had to bundle up or stay cool, we got a bit more resilient when it came to being outside. Almost everyone can find a park, a boardwalk, or any available outdoor space to get it done.

For people with an anxiety disorder, exercise is often touted as a miracle cure for managing symptoms. And, in some ways, it is. There’s a growing body of research that suggests working up a sweat and moving your body can help you both cope with (and prevent) anxiety. It can be a powerful way to divert your focus from spiraling thoughts and even help regulate brain chemistry when you’re doing it on a consistent basis.

That said, “just work out” is a wildly oversimplified solution, and honestly, being told that feels trite when you’re living with the impacts of anxiety on the daily.

To understand how exercise can positively impact anxiety, it helps to have a sense of what’s actually happening in the brain and body when one is in the thick of it.

When you feel anxious, your body is alert, signaling your brain to prepare to fight or flight. What this means is that your brain floods your central nervous system with cortisol and adrenaline, which tell your body to prepare for danger. Whereas the sympathetic nervous system typically helps the brain and body calm down after sensing a threat, when you’re dealing with an anxious brain, reaching that level of calm may seem close to impossible.

The exercise-anxiety connection, enter, exercise. Hitting the gym releases mood-regulating neurotransmitters and chemicals including dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins, which can help chill out those feelings of anxiety and stress. It’s not more-ismore, though. Exercise has been shown to help “restore” balance in the brain in terms of neurotransmitters, rather than creating more. In anxious brains, neurotransmitters are not being transmitted from one cell to the next very efficiently, so it doesn’t get around the brain as effectively as it should. Exercise is one of the practices that can help regulate this.

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