When it comes to staying in good shape, it’s only natural that we look to exercise. Exercising is good for both body and mind, and tends to be a very important part of living a healthy life. However, when works gets in the way, it becomes increasingly easy to see exercise as a thing that simply takes up time. If you see exercise as a burden, then you might want to look closer at the benefits.

There are many great benefits to come from taking the time to exercise. For many people, it’s one of the most effective ways to improve upon your physical and mental health. Did you know, though, just how good exercise can be for both your long-term career prospects and your overall health?

That’s right: working out is going to have a major impact on both your quality of life and the quality of your career. If you want to start looking after your body, then you absolutely need to know where to start. So, let’s take a look at what you can do for your body, simply by taking the time to exercise a little more. Gym Equipment UK have prepared a list of 55 exercises that you can find below, suitable for both in the gym and at home.

How much exercise do you need?

Of course, simply running on the spot for 5 minutes per day isn’t going to make a big impact on your quality of life. However, if you were willing to put in around an hour and a half per week – 90 to 100 minutes – you would feel the benefits very quickly. However, the more that you can do the better the results will be. Basically, anything that you can find brings on an increased heart rate is likely to be of benefit to you.

By the same token, you will get to enjoy more even from a simple 90-minute workout per week. You will be less likely to suffer from stress and from physical cramps, and you will be more likely to see changes to things like your timekeeping, your overall mood and your ability to handle stressful situations.

So, even if you can find enough space for 2-hours of physical activity, then you will start to see some immediate and lasting benefits in the near future. it does not have to be too much on a daily basis, but enough to see you actually start to work up a sweat.

Greater desire

Of course, everyone wants to feel like they can work through the pain barrier and get things done. When you wake up in the morning, it’s all well and good having intentions of giving it 100% today: will you? For lots of us, that’s a common issue. As soon as the going gets tough, we’re too quick to give up and just let the problem overwhelm us. Naturally, you want to get out of the frame of mind which creates this kind of reaction.

If you want to find yourself getting through such issues, then you should absolutely look at working out more. You will be more motivated to get things done, as you start to see a physical change in yourself. This makes you much more likely to press on through a negative issue and persevere accordingly.

Should you find it tough to come up with an optimistic approach to life when in the workplace, go for a quick workout. Coming back into work feeling physically fitter is going to help you maintain a mind-set which allows you to overcome the challenge at hand and stay in a much fresher and more optimistic frame of mind.

Fresher ideas

For someone who works in a workplace that needs more creativity, you might find it hard to overcome the challenges that you face. Mental block can ruin the best of positive intentions, so you might just find it hard to get things done and to see positive transformation in the way that you come up with ideas. When you need to get through a challenging day and you need to find a bit of inspiration, an unhealthy body is unlikely to come up with the creative juices that you need.

A more balanced body and mind is much more likely to see through those issues, though. When you feel better you are more likely to work through a creative block and come through the other side feeling generally more upbeat and positive. If you would like to keep making progress, then, you should probably go for a little workout before you start each day.

The body enjoys coming out of its own creative block, but sometimes it can be hard to coax the mind to do so. With a bit of encouragement from a workout, though, that problem will soon become a thing of the past.

Get on better with others

When you aren’t feeling great about yourself, it becomes pretty easy to start feeling bad about others. When you go for a workout, though, you are much more likely to find yourself more tolerant of others. Got a workplace colleague – or even a close friend – who is driving you around the bend at the moment? Then start working out more!

You will be shocked at the sheer scale of improvement which can come from just being a bit more proactive with your workouts. You will, before long, overcome these issue and start to look at the situation a bit more analytically. When we aren’t so consumed by our own issues, we can tend to take a more analytical view of things instead of simply looking at everything through an emotional prism.

So, if you find it hard to work with others, or spend time with others, then you will soon find that working out can put an end to that particular problem. Working with challenging people can be quite the task: with a fresher body, though, your mind might be a bit more willing to put up with their more irritable side!

Stand up for yourself

The same goes for when you want to actually stand up to others, though. If someone in your workplace or personal life is being quite domineering, then you might find it hard to resist them. However, when you feel a bit more physically active, you will stand up for your beliefs and your ideas more readily. That’s quite important, as it will help you to see that both your ideas are sound and that you have the physical confidence to take a stand.

So, don’t let others always tell you what to do, or what the next move is. With the help of a bit of extra working out and physical improvement, you are much more likely to show the others who is in charge. Take more control of yourself physically, and before long you won’t be so willing to put your own wants and needs to the back of the queue.

If you feel like you have something valuable to offer the world, then don’t just let that subside. A bit of extra working out and physical conditioning, though, might see you finally tell others that, for once, you are doing what you want to.

Stay sharper

The key to good workplace success is the ability to stay mentally focused and on the task at hand. Well, as they say, a healthy body helps to create a healthy mind. If you are fitter physically, your mind is less likely to wander and lose track of the problem at hand. Then, you are much more likely to come up with intelligent, clinical solutions which actually make sense.

With that in mind, then, you can see why working out should be good for workplace performance. You will be more alert and more likely to be able to keep yourself sharpened and focused for the challenges to come. When you go through a regular exercise regime, the effects and benefits are going to come from the fact that your mind can handle stress and distraction more readily.

If you are someone who worries that you might struggle to deal with the challenges of the day, then you should look to work out a bit more. It becomes a bit easier to get through a challenging day without making mistakes when your body is able to physically handle the scale of stress that the task at hand has produced.

Less time off

While that might not sound like a good thing, as we all enjoy some personal time, working out will make you less susceptible to injury. Physical workouts have a major impact on our physical health. Often, it plays a major role in helping to get your body into the kind of physical shape and form that you would have always wanted.

The other side impact of exercising so regularly, though, is that you will begin to feel stronger and fitter in terms of resisting illness. If you often find that you feel quite ill and you fall prey to things like colds on a regular basis, then exercising is going to help you put an end to this problem.

If you are regularly exercising, then your body is going to help make your immune system become stronger and less likely to suffer from the impact of an illness. This is very important if you work in a location where people are regularly coming down with things like the common cold.

This helps you to quickly side step that issue and make sure you are free from the symptoms of the cold a lot quicker than you would normally.

Last for longer

Do you ever reach a point in the year where you just need some time to yourself? Where work and personal life have become a massive stress? Then it’s time to think about how you can manage to last for a little bit longer. If you work out, then your mental stresses are less likely to lead to physical exhaustion. It also means that, when stressful moments take place, you are not very likely to suffer from such a quick drop-off in performance.

You might be able to spend more time just getting through your personal and professional challenges, no longer burdened by the need to just get away from it all. This is a two-way street: you will simply feel like you are more willing to take things on, and situations which might normally have become a huge stressor for you will seem trivial in comparison.

Thanks to that, you can often get more done in less time than you would normally assume. The end result is that you are much more likely to simply see yourself persevere through the tough days. That can be one of the most important benefits of working out, both personally and professionally.

General happiness

Last but certainly not least, exercise is going to improve your workplace performance – and your lifestyle – because you will generally be much happier. The happier you are, the more likely you are to actually get things done. This will see you push through the challenges at hand, and you will also feel better about yourself. It’s a virtuous cycle: you make a bit of an effort to maintain a good physical shape, and soon you will feel very much happy with yourself.

If you then push on with your physical work, you will see even more progress. A lack of workplace performance – and lifestyle improvement – often comes from simply not having the mind-set or the self-belief to imagine that you can change. With the help of a bit of extra working out, you will soon overcome that. You start to see yourself becoming more productive and achieving more in life, with the end result being someone who feels much better thanks to the production of extra serotonin and dopamine in the body.

These are quite literally “feel good” factor chemicals. If your body is producing them, you are much more likely to overcome challenges and feel pretty good about it as you do so.

By Eddy

Eddy is the editorial columnist in Business Fundas, and oversees partner relationships. He posts articles of partners on various topics related to strategy, marketing, supply chain, technology management, social media, e-business, finance, economics and operations management. The articles posted are copyrighted under a Creative Commons unported license 4.0. To contact him, please direct your emails to [email protected].