Can you run every day to meet fitness and health goals?

In the last post, I began looking at the question of how often should you run.

One of the biggest determining factors in how often you run (or do any exercise) has to be your fitness and health goals.   This is because your goals will help keep you on track, drive you toward a measurable result, and encourage you to push on – even when you don’t feel like doing your run.  Short term goals like preparing for an upcoming race can help push you to run more frequently or to do a specific type of running workout.  We’ve already covered some of the benefits that come specifically from running in previous posts. It’s also helpful to also remember that regular exercise itself has so many beneficial effects on your body and overall health.

image courtesy of kozzi.com

In order to reap these benefits, exercise has to be done regularly – and I recommend that it be daily.  Can this daily exercise be running?  Yes, it can be.  Should it be?  That is where personal choice comes in.  If running is something you love, or is something that will help you stay on track with regular daily exercise, then a definite yes.  Can you benefit from adding other types of exercise besides running to your fitness routine to optimize a healthy lifestyle?  This also gets a yes, and we’ll explore this idea further in an upcoming post.  Also in an upcoming post we’ll look at what might preclude you from running every day.

To underscore the benefits of making this regular (and daily), I’ll end this post with a reference to a Duke University Medical Center research study that revealed that regular exercise IS effective in lowering bad cholesterol levels.  This study showed a clear benefit of lowered harmful cholesterol levels in participants who regularly exercised.  It also found that some exercise is better than no exercise, but the biggest impact comes from increasing the amount of exercise – as in doing it daily. It’s worth noting that jogging and brisk walking were the types of exercise used in this study.

Questions or comments?  Use the reply form below – I’d love to hear from you.

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