Your heart beats faster and faster as your exercise gets more and more strenuous. Why? It’s pumping more oxygen, so your body can produce more and more energy. Like leg and arm muscles, your heart muscle needs regular workouts. But how fast is safe and healthy? Your target heart rate—beats per minute (bpm)—during a workout
Physical activity is bodily movement produced by the contraction of skeletal muscle that increases energy expenditure above the basal level. In contrast, exercise denotes a subcategory of physical activity that is planned, structured, repetitive, and purposive in the sense that improvement or maintenance of one or more components of physical fitness is the objective. Physical
Quality of life (QOL) assessments are instrumental in developing a more comprehensive understanding of the efficacy of disease prevention and health promotion interventions. There is growing interest in delineating the role of exercise in enhancing QOL outcomes. Indeed, findings from multiple reviews on the effect of exercise on QOL reveal that exercise consistently results in
Sleep is critical to normal physiological and psychological function, and people spend nearly one third of their lives asleep. Usual sleep duration is considered to be between 7 and 9 hours per night for healthy adults. The different stages of sleep have historically been defined according to the 1968 classification rules of Alan Rechtschaffen and Anthony
In the fields of neuroscience and cognitive science, human cognition is broadly defined as a component of brain function that includes information processing, memory, attention, perception, language, and executive function related to decision making (DM) and the initiation or inhibition of behavior. In the context of sport and exercise psychology, researchers have been interested in
For more than 100 years, researchers have noted how exercise enhances the subjective sense of mental and physical energy. Affect refers to the quality of a subjective mental state along the dimensions of valence (pleasant or positive vs. unpleasant or negative) and activation (alert or activated vs. sleepy or deactivated). This entry will summarize research
Many people become physically active to improve their health and to look and feel better. But physical activity may become addictive for a small proportion (3%–5%) of the population. It is important to emphasize that while exercise may represent an addictive behavior for some people who engage in it to an extreme and unhealthy level,
Interventions in the field of exercise or physical activity (PA) psychology focus on issues related to health rather than on issues related to performance in sport. Exercise, by definition, suggests a form of PA that is often structured and undertaken with the aim of improving fitness. However, health benefits can be obtained from more incidental
Exercise has been proposed as a potential treatment to help people quit smoking and, more recently, to treat addictions to alcohol and other drugs of abuse. This entry discusses the rationale and empirical support for the use of exercise as a treatment for addiction. Rationale Exercise has been proposed as a stand-alone or supplementary treatment
Exercise, physical activity, and fitness are distinct but interrelated concepts (Caspersen et al. 1985). Physical activity is any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscle, while exercise is planned and repeated physical activity that is structured into individuals’ lives with the purpose of maintaining or improving some attribute of either health or skill (i.e., fitness). Exercise