The Health Benefits of Exercise

Exercise is one of the most important factors in a persons’ life. Physical activity, or the lack of it, can result in a person having a healthy life or cause them to have diabetes. The benefits of exercise are countless. The positive health results, the improvement in attitude, even better academic performance are all factors which make not exercising inexcusable.

Merely not using a person’s body is harmful. Not being active results in a person’s muscles becoming weak and out of condition. The effectiveness of a person’s heart and lungs will decrease. A person’s joints will become stiff and can be injured easily. Inactivity can be as much of a health risk as smoking. In addition children have become extremely lazy with all the entertainment available in this day and age. Most Americans watch three and a half hours of television every day. By the age of sixty five over nine years will have been spent in front of a screen. Over one-third children from ages four to nineteen eat fast food every day and fifteen percent in that age set are obese. It is especially important to prevent children and adolescences from becoming obese. According to “Obesity and Overweight for Professionals: Data and Statistics” eighty percent of obese children become obese adults. The number of overweight children in America has doubled since the 1980s. People have begun resorting to unsuccessful diets and each day thousands of teens become bulimic or anorexic to

lose weight. Thirty four to thirty seven percent of adults in America are obese. This has increased dramatically in the past twenty years (“Obesity”).

The simple answer to this problem is to start exercising. The U.S. Department of Health and Human services says that children and teens need a...

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