Benefits of cardiovascular exercise program

Less sitting time and more physical activity also helps you maintain a healthy weight by burning more calories throughout the day. Your pancreas is the organ that helps convert the food you eat for energy while also helping aid in digestion.

Staying active helps improves blood sugar control, decreases stress on this vital organ and reduces your chance of developing type 2 diabetes. It also helps improves good cholesterol levels while lowering blood fats. Did you know that your favorite physical activity helps sexual function?

One study reported that staying active improves erectile function and proved to be a protective factor against erectile problems, while another study found that positive body image and psychological health due to exercise increased sexual well-being in women.

Our moods fluctuate on a daily basis but staying active helps boost your mood, especially after a stressful day. Physical exercise helps your energy by releasing endorphins, giving you more, lasting energy throughout your day. When it comes to hitting the sheets, struggling to fall asleep is the last thing you want after that long, busy day. The good news is that cardio helps you doze off faster and promotes REM sleep.

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Enter your email. I'd like to receive the latest news and updates from ACE. What are the guidelines for percentage of body fat loss? Is it ever okay for your knees to extend beyond your toes while doing squats or lunges? All ladies had their blood taken earlier than, after, and at completely different intervals within the days and weeks after these train periods. The outcomes confirmed that common and reasonable cardio train will increase sure antibodies within the blood referred to as immunoglobulins.

That finally strengthens the immune system. The sedentary group of ladies noticed no enchancment in immune system perform and their cortisol ranges have been a lot increased than these within the energetic teams. Do you know that the mind begins shedding tissue after you attain age 30? Scientists have uncovered that cardio train could sluggish this loss and enhance cognitive efficiency.

To check this principle, 55 older adults submitted magnetic resonance imaging MRI scans for analysis. The individuals have been then examined to evaluate their well being, together with cardio health. The adults who have been most match confirmed fewer reductions within the frontal, parietal, and temporal areas of the mind.

Total, their mind tissue was extra sturdy. Transferring your physique may additionally enhance your temper. In a single research on people with despair, individuals walked on a treadmill doing intervals for half-hour a session.

After 10 days, they have been requested to report any modifications of their temper. By contrast, departmental occupational based interventions can be applied through managers to departments or workplaces as a group Maslach, It is in this domain that exercise interventions are an appealing proposal. Whilst commitment to an exercise program occurs at an individual level and provides individual results, departmental initiation and encouragement of team members is likely to enhance the effect of the intervention and promotes workplace involvement, motivation and provides social opportunities for employees to interact.

The concept of exercise and its positive impact on mental health is not a new phenomenon. Dating back to the s research has reported that exercise results in increased mood, self-concept, and work performance including greater productivity and reduced absenteeism Seraganian, More recent research by Cox et al. In subsequent research, Cox et al. They found that vigorous exercise had a greater effect on positive well-being than moderate intensity exercise, whilst concomitantly finding an overall reduction in psychological distress in comparison to a control condition, but with comparable efficacy between the two treatment conditions Cox et al.

Whilst the aforementioned literature compared moderate and vigorous cardiovascular exercise, thereby preventing direct comparison, the current cardiovascular condition would be considered a vigorous training program, whereas the resistance training program is moderate intensity.

Also, Cox et al. However, consistent with their distinctions, the current study views fatigue as an acute physical condition. In contrast, this study views exhaustion as chronic, psychological, emotional exhaustion as defined in the burnout literature Maslach, Gerber et al.

Both Gerber et al. Introducing exercise to a sedentary population and measuring the effect over time four weeks of different exercise types cardiovascular and resistance against multiple measures of stress including well-being, perceived stress, and burnout has not been attempted. Research in this area will deliver valuable insight into understanding how exercise impacts perceived stress and burnout. Organisational burnout is the result of a unique combination of stressors specific to each workplace, therefore a single burnout intervention is unlikely to be universally effective.

This research aims to provide insight into which aspects of exercise are effective in reducing the different aspects of psychological stress and burnout to allow exercise professionals, individual employees, and managers to tailor employee exercise programs to the exercise type, frequency and duration most applicable to the burnout as experienced by that particular employee.

It was hypothesised that a the exercise conditions resistance and cardiovascular together will show increased positive well-being, decreased perceived stress, and decreased burnout health state after four weeks of exercise; b cardiovascular and resistance exercise will affect positive health state and perceived stress and burnout differently; and c exercise frequency and duration will be positively correlated with positive health state and negatively correlated with perceived stress and burnout health state.

Figure 1 represents diagrammatically the flow of participants through the study. Those participants not employed for a minimum of 20 hours per week, were excluded from comparison on the Maslach Burnout Inventory MBI. Participants completed three self-report measures of stress and well-being, demographic questions, a health screen based on SportUNE pre-exercise medical standards, and an exercise diary as detailed below. The SEES has strong internal consistency positive well-being.

The SEES was chosen for this study given its design to allow comparative analysis before and after exercise measuring both the increase of positive affect and the reduction or absence of negative symptomatology i. Additionally, this scale provides a subjective measure of physical fatigue, which for the present study provides a useful comparison to the measure of emotional fatigue i.

The Perceived Stress Scale PSS; Cohen, is the most widely used instrument for measuring the degree to which situations are perceived as stressful to the individual over the last month. Items 4, 5, 7, and 8 are positively stated e. For the current study we do not assume that response to stress is consistent, as we know that response to workplace stress varies with levels of burnout Maslach, As previously introduced, situations where perceived demands are in excesses of physical or personal resources are commonly encountered in the workplace therefore the two constructs of perceived stress and occupational burnout are interwoven.

It has 22 items presented on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from 0 Never to 6 Every day. Test-retest reliability is reported at: EE. Demographic questions. Participants were also asked their height and weight from which body mass index was calculated , current employment and study commitments, education status, and income.

Health screen. Participants completed a pre-exercise health screen online. Participants with existing medical conditions were able to participate providing they gained an appropriate medical certificate recommending exercise participation. Exercise diary. Participants reported their existing monthly exercise patterns with the following prompts: walk 5 km or more, run 3 km or more, swim laps, bicycle, attend a gym, play sport, and other.

During the two and four week questionnaires, participants reported the type, frequency and duration of exercise conducted over the study period. Participants provided electronic informed consent. Participants allocated to the exercise conditions met with the experimenter, conducted a safety brief, program overview, and blood pressure screening for hypertension.

Participants in the resistance condition were taught correct exercise technique on an individual basis before being provided a training program. Cardiovascular condition training consisted of group fitness classes taken under qualified instructors, as well as individual exercise such as running, cycling, and swimming negating the requirement for individual instruction.

Participants were asked to complete a minimum of three 30 min sessions of their allocated exercise per week for four weeks based on the frequency and intensity recommendations by the American College of Sports Medicine Garber et al.

The participants in the control condition were informed that they were on a waiting list for participation in exercise program, and were asked to complete the online data collection initially and at two and four weeks, before being reallocated to one of the exercise conditions. Although gym membership aided in program compliance it was not a prerequisite for participation, with the training programs designed to be conducted at home with minimal equipment.

Statistical comparison of participant outcomes by location did not reveal any significant differences. SPSS version 21 was used for statistical analysis. For the testing of Hypothesis 1 , participants in cardiovascular and resistance conditions were combined and recoded into a new variable exercise to compare exercise with control.

Pearson correlations were calculated across all subscales to test Hypothesis 3. Participants came from a range of occupations, but most frequent was education All participants worked or studied for a minimum of 20 hours per week. Table 1 shows baseline descriptive statistics for all subscales across treatment conditions i. Table 1 also displays t values that represent the comparison between the exercise and control group showing no between group differences at study enlistment but, as expected, differences on completion of the intervention.

The exercise condition is based on the combination of the cardiovascular and resistance conditions and was used as the dependent variable for the t test. At baseline, In comparison, at four weeks the control condition remained at Repeated measures t -tests for the control group did not reveal any statistically significant changes over the four weeks. Table 2 shows the results of the analysis comparing exercise and control. There was greater well-being and less psychological distress in the exercise than the control condition.

Again group comparison showed that the exercise condition had less perceived stress than the control. Furthermore, there were significant condition effects for the emotional exhaustion and personal accomplishment.

The exercise condition had less emotional exhaustion and greater levels of personal accomplishment than the control condition. Table 3 shows the results for the cardiovascular vs. The cardiovascular and resistance conditions both showed significantly greater positive well-being than the control condition, but were comparable to each other.

The cardiovascular condition reduced psychological distress compared with the control condition. The participants in the cardiovascular and resistance conditions reported significantly less perceived stress than the participants in the control condition. The cardiovascular condition tended to reduce emotional exhaustion as compared to the control condition.