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With all of the media attention about health, most people are very much aware of the overall benefit of physical fitness and being physically fit. However, knowing the overall benefit and understanding the details of how it affects your body are two totally different things. So the purpose of this article is to provide you with the specific benefits of how physical fitness affects your health, your body, and your life. And, one of the easiest ways to show you is by breaking down the benefits in terms of the 5 components of physical fitness. Please note that this is not an exhaustive list, but it is definitely enough to help you see the tremendous benefit of physical fitness.

The benefits of cardiovascular fitness:

- Enables you to handle the seemingly endless daily activities required to get you through the day
- Strengthens the heart
- Conditions heart and lungs by increasing oxygen available to the body and enables heart to use oxygen more efficiently
- Helps to increase resistance to fatigue
- Gives extra energy
- Tones muscles
- Decreases tension
- Sleep better
- Decreases depression and anxiety
- More able to handle stress
- Reduces risk of coronary heart disease and some forms of cancer
- Strengthen bones
- Increases lung capacity
- Decreases blood pressure
- Decreases body fat percentage (lose weight)

Since these next two components are not the same but go together for most people, we will combine their benefits. The benefits of muscular endurance and muscular strength:

- Abdominal endurance helps prevent low back problems
- Improves body fat percentage
- Increases metabolism
- Helps to maintain your bone structure
- Decreases resting blood pressure
- Improves cholesterol levels
- Increases bone density and reduces the risk of osteoporosis
- Increases natural human growth hormone (HGH) which in itself is known to boost sexual potency, improve sleep, improve memory, and decrease wrinkles
- Increases testosterone
- Better looking physical appearance and improves self-image
- Increases self-esteem
- Reduces constant muscle loss (atrophy) as you age
- Increases athletic or sport performance

The benefits of flexibility fitness:

- Helps to better cope with daily activities.
- Essential to protecting joints and keeping them healthy
- Helps to strengthen your back to prevent low back pain
- Reduces the appearance and effects of arthritis
- Reduces muscle-tendon injuries
- Improves your posture
- Increases range of motion around joints
- Decreases the chance of muscle strains and pulls and ligaments tears
- Maintains body balance
- Helps to recover quicker from sport injury
- Get out of bed without being stiff and sore
- Decreases muscle soreness (from exercise or activities)

The benefit of body composition:

- Body composition is useful in determining health risks.
- Doing the right types of exercises will help you decrease fat and increase or maintain muscle
- Excessive body fat detracts from the other fitness components, reduces performance, detracts from appearance, negatively affects your health
- When the body fat ratio is high, you are considered over weight or even obese
- A high fat ratio is a sign of a greater chance of developing coronary heart disease, diabetes, joint and back pains, arthritis and higher risk of tendon-muscular accidents and injuries due to inactivity

As mentioned at the beginning of this article, it is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is a great start for your understanding. As a matter of fact, one of the biggest and most important benefits is what being healthy and physically fit can do for you mentally. A few things were mentioned above about the mental benefits but the impact is much greater.

When youre physically fit, sure your body feels great and physically you look good, but the mental benefits are absolutely priceless. Imagine having the peace of mind to handle life, the everyday events, and just whatever comes your way without letting it wear you down. In addition, you feel sharper and think more clearly.

Getting started with fitness is easy, because you can start by doing something every day of the week or just once a week and work your way up to at least three days a week for just 20 minutes a day. It doesnt matter, because the key is to start somewhere anywhere. Just start! I promise you will never regret it.

One of the absolute best sources of information that Ive found for completely understanding the benefit of physical fitness exercises is RIGHT HERE