Did you know that by participating in physical activity and exercise, you are helping yourself fight off germs? By exercising at a moderate intensity, you are boosting your immune system and thereby fighting off illnesses. Other ways to help your immune system is to eat a healthy diet and reduce stress.1 Health care professionals can say with confidence that exercising regularly will help their patients boost their immune system and result in better health.

Personally Fit now offers a class called Afterburn. This class is only a half hour and takes place during lunch time so that people can participate during the work day. One of the goals of this class is to continue to burn calories after the class has ended. How is it possible to continue to burn a substantial number of calories after a workout is already completed? It is because of a phenomenon called excess post-exercise oxygen consumption (EPOC).

It is well known that regular exercise has a beneficial affect on “cardiovascular fitness and function, muscular strength, bone mineral density, weight management, metabolic health, disease prevention and management, as well as mortality.”3 Another benefit of exercise that is not as well known is its effect on cognitive function. For this blog, we will be defining cognitive function as “the mental faculty of knowing, which includes perceiving, recognizing, conceiving, judging, reasoning, and imagining.”3 Cognitive function can be broken down into four subcategories: (1) receptive functions (classifying), (2) memory and learning, (3) thinking, and (4) expressive functions.

The following Guidelines come from the American College of Sports Medicine (ACSM) website (www.acsm.org). ACSM, founded is 1954, is an organization that promotes research, education, and practical application for sports medicine and exercise science. This research helps exercise professionals provide the most up-to-date and reliable information to those we work with. Continue reading to see how your workouts “measure up” to the guidelines.