ARTICLE REVIEW

Article Review

Article Review

Exercise changes the body's chemistry. Seniors benefit by improving quality of life, slowing the processes of deterioration, maintaining overall fitness leading to greater independence in later years. The long-term Harvard Nurses' Health Study indicated specific benefits of mild-to-moderate exercise. Just getting moving is the first step. Including any activity to increase movement, from gardening to golf or dancing, allows a person to start expending energy, allows the muscles to work.

Boyum (2001) mentions benefits from exercise include physical, psychological, and quality of life. Physical benefits include fewer fatal heart attacks, diminished risk for stroke, reduced risk for some cancers, and maintained bone density. Psychological benefits include the release of endorphins acting as antidepressants, decreased stress and improved coping skills, better mood, improved feeling of well-being, and better attitude. Quality-of-life benefits include increased energy and endurance, improved sleep, and better sexual function. Existing medical conditions are not an excuse to keep from exercising. Exercise can provide improvement (Boyum, 2001). For arthritis, professionals recommend low impact, starting slow, and paying attention to the body's signals like additional pain to stop. For those people with diabetes or diabetes risk factors, exercise improves the body's ability to convert blood sugar to energy and has a stabilizing effect on blood sugar. This paper presents the review of the article mentioned in the list of references.

Article Review

Becoming and staying fit is hard work. If it were easier, more people would exercise and, after a while, become habituated, if not addicted, to it, as I am. As an exercise junkie, I admit I sometimes get carried away, particularly when lecturing on wellness, when I tend to make exercise sound almost too good to be true. To hear me go on about it, you would think running, biking, swimming, walking, resistance training and all forms of heavy breathing were panaceas, capable of curing whatever ailed you. Fortunately, I have learned to moderate my enthusiasm of late, thus all I say about exercise now is that it makes people fun, romantic and hip, sexy and free and all who work out strenuously on a daily basis are warmer in winter, cooler in summer and sleep better all year round (Boyum, 2001).

Well, OK, maybe I also claim that strenuous daily exercisers are stronger and better looking, have higher morale, superior bowel movements and more antibodies to resist aging and disease. Maybe I also tend to mention that exercise makes people wildly popular, and tends to cause insurance rates and taxes to fall while enabling better gas mileage. So, perhaps I do get a little carried away. I'll work on moderating my enthusiasm for exercise and fitness, but it won't be easy for me--the benefits of working out are just amazing.

I thought I had read or heard of all the health and other advantages that exercise enables, based on extensive double-blind, crossover trials of a longitudinal basis. I mentioned a few of these countless payoffs already, from less illness to more energy and so on, but recently I came across ...