Unhealthy Exercise
Exercising is a crucial component of any healthy life. An overall healthy lifestyle includes exercise, low stress and tension, a healthy diet, regular doctors and dentist visits, and maintenance of appropriate weight and blood pressure. However, any element of good health that becomes compulsive exercise may have potential to do greater harm than good mentally and physically.
Many people begin exercising with weight maintnenance or weight loss as the objective. Exercise is indeed part of a safe and healthy way to maintain weight. Unfortunately, many people may have unrealistic and erroneous expectations due to misinformation from media sources and misunderstanding of their own body’s natural potential. Bombardment of body images from advertisers of the ideal body: young and thin for women; strong and muscular for men seduce young and old alike to pursue unreasonable ideals, and unreasonable results. People often grow frustrated with the results from diets and simple exercise routines and may overexercise to speed up weight loss and enhance weight/muscular gain.
Even some athletes also believe that repeated compulsive exercise will help them to perform at an elevated level and add extra workouts to regularly scheduled team practices without consulting their coaches, trainers, or team physicians. The body has a high capacity for exertion, growth, even pain, but also has an inherent need for rest to maximize the positive results of any regiment. In fact, overexercising can even lead to injuries such as: stress-fractures, muscle strains/tears, tendon and ligament damage, and irreversible muscle damage.
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