Exercise and Modern Living Health Psychology

Exercise and Modern Living Health Psychology One thing is certain. Most people do not get enough exercise in their ordinary routines. All of the advances of modern technology – from electric can openers to power steering  have made life easier, more comfortable and much less physically demanding. Yet our bodies need activity, especially if they are carrying around too much fat. Satisfying this need requires a definite plan, and a commitment. There are two main

Ways to increase the number of calories you expend:
1. Start a regular exercise program if you do not have one already.
2. Increase the amount of physical activity in your daily routine.
The best way to control your weight is a combination of the above. The sum total of calories used over time
will help regulate your weight as well as keep you physically fit.

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Active Lifestyles Exercise in Health Psychology

Before looking at what kind of regular exercise program is best, let's look at how you can increase the
amount of physical activity in your daily routine to supplement your exercise program.
• Recreational pursuits such as gardening on weekends, bowling in the office league, family outings,
an evening of social dancing, and many other activities provide added exercise. They are fun and
can be considered an extra bonus in your weight control campaign.
• Add more "action" to your day. Walk to the neighborhood grocery store instead of using the car.
Park several blocks from the office and walk the rest of the way. Walk up the stairs instead of using
the elevator; start with one flight of steps and gradually increase.
• Change your attitude toward movement. Instead of considering an extra little walk or trip to the
files an annoyance, look upon it as an added fitness boost. Look for opportunities to use your
body. Bend, stretch, reach, move, lift and carry. Time-saving devices and gadgets eliminate
drudgery and are a bonus to mankind, but when they substitute too often for physical activity they
can demand a high cost in health, vigor and fitness.
These little bits of action are cumulative in their effects. Alone, each does not burn a huge amount of
calories. But when added together they can result in a sizable amount of energy used over the course of the
day. And they will help improve your muscle tone and flexibility at the same time.

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Strength Training in Health Psychology

Strength Training in Health Psychology In addition to the aerobic exercise, supplement your program with muscle strengthening and stretching exercises. Strength training is another way for you to meet the recommended minimum of 30 minutes of moderate-intensity physical activity each day. Strength training will help you burn extra calories, build strong muscles, bones, and joints, and improve your physical functioning. The stronger your muscles, the longer you will be able to keep going during aerobic activity, and the less chance of injury. Experts recommend strength training 2 to 3 days each week, with 1 full day of rest between workouts to allow your muscles to recover. If you are new to strength training or physical activity in general, consider hiring a certified personal trainer who can plan an individualized program to help you work out safely and effectively.

How Much? How Often?
Experts recommend that you do some form of aerobic exercise at least three times a week for a minimum
of 20 continuous minutes. Of course, if that is too much, start with a shorter time span and gradually build
up to the minimum. Then gradually progress until you are able to work aerobically for 20-40 minutes. If you
need to lose a large amount of weight, you may want to do your aerobic workout five times a week.
It is important to exercise at an intensity vigorous enough to cause your heart rate and breathing to increase.
How hard you should exercise depends to a certain degree on your age, and is determined by measuring
your heart rate in beats per minute.

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Kind of Exercise in Health Psychology

Although any kind of physical in Health Psychology movement requires energy (calories), the type of exercise that uses the most energy is aerobic exercise. The term "aerobic" is derived from the Greek word meaning "with oxygen." Jogging, brisk walking, swimming, biking, cross-country skiing and aerobic dancing are some popular forms of aerobic exercise.

Aerobic exercises use the body's large muscle groups in continuous, rhythmic, sustained movement and
require oxygen for the production of energy. When oxygen is combined with food (which can come from
stored fat) energy is produced to power the body's musculature. The longer you move aerobically, the more
energy needed and the more calories used. Regular aerobic exercise will improve your cardiorespiratory
endurance, the ability of your heart, lungs, blood vessels and associated tissues to use oxygen to produce
energy needed for activity. You'll build a healthier body while getting rid of excess body fat.

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Measuring Your Heart Rate | Health Psychology

Heart rate is widely accepted as a good method for measuring intensity during running, swimming, cycling,
and other aerobic activities. Exercise that doesn’t raise your heart rate to a certain level and keep it there for
20 minutes won’t contribute significantly to cardiovascular fitness.
The heart rate you should maintain is called your target heart rate. There are several ways of arriving at this
figure. One of the simplest is: maximum heart rate (220 - age) x 70%. Thus, the target heart rate for a 40
year-old would be 126.
Beginners should maintain the 60 percent level, more advanced can work up to the 80 percent level. This is
just a guide however, and people with any medical limitations should discuss this formula with their
physician.
You can do different types of aerobic activities, say walking one day, riding a bike the next. Make sure you
choose an activity that can be done regularly, and is enjoyable for you. The important thing to remember is
not to skip too many days between workouts or fitness benefits will be lost. If you must lose a few days,
gradually work back into your routine.

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Checking Your Health The Way of Health Psychology

If you're under 35 and in good health, you don't need to see a doctor before beginning an exercise program.
But if you are over 35 and have been inactive for several years, you should consult your physician, who may
or may not recommend a graded exercise test. Other conditions that indicate a need for medical clearance are:

• High blood pressure.
• Heart trouble.
• Family history of early stroke or heart attack deaths.
• Frequent dizzy spells.
• Extreme breathlessness after mild exertion.
• Arthritis or other bone problems.
• Severe muscular, ligament or tendon problems.
• Other known or suspected disease.

Vigorous exercise involves minimal health risks for persons in good health or those following a doctor’s
advice. Far greater risks are presented by habitual inactivity and obesity.

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Defining Physical Fitness in The Way of Health Psychology

Physical fitness is to the human body what fine tuning is to an engine. It enables us to perform up to our
potential. Fitness in The Way of Health Psychology can be described as a condition that helps us look, feel and do our best. More specifically, “The ability to perform daily tasks vigorously and alertly, with energy left over for enjoying leisure- time activities and meeting emergency demands. It is the ability to endure, to bear up, to withstand stress, to carry on in circumstances where an unfit person could not continue, and is a major basis for good health and well-being.”

Physical fitness involves the performance of the heart and lungs, and the muscles of the body. And, since
what we do with our bodies also affects what we can do with our minds, fitness influences to some degree
qualities such as mental alertness and emotional stability.
As you undertake your fitness program, it’s important to remember that fitness is an individual quality that
varies from person to person. It is influenced by age, sex, heredity, personal habits, exercise and eating
practices. You can’t do anything about the first three factors. However, it is within your power to change
and improve the others where needed.
Knowing the Basics
Physical fitness is most easily understood by examining its components, or “parts.” There is widespread
agreement that these four components are basic:

Cardiorespiratory Endurance - the ability to deliver oxygen and nutrients to tissues, and to remove
wastes, over sustained periods of time. Long runs and swims are among the methods employed in
measuring this component.

Muscular Strength - the ability of a muscle to exert force for a brief period of time. Upper-body strength,
for example, can be measured by various weight-lifting exercises.

Muscular Endurance - the ability of a muscle, or a group of muscles, to sustain repeated contractions or
to continue applying force against a fixed object. Pushups are often used to test endurance of arm and
shoulder muscles.

Flexibility - the ability to move joints and use muscles through their full range of motion. The sit-and-
reach test is a good measure of flexibility of the lower back and backs of the upper legs.

Body Composition is often considered a component of fitness. It refers to the makeup of the body in
terms of lean mass (muscle, bone, vital tissue and organs) and fat mass. An optimal ratio of fat to lean mass
is an indication of fitness, and the right types of exercises will help you decrease body fat and increase or
maintain muscle mass.

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A Workout Schedule of Exercise in Health Psychology

A Workout Schedule often, how long and how hard you exercise, and what kinds of exercises you do should be determined by what you are trying to accomplish. Your goals, your present fitness level, age, health, skills, interest and convenience are among the factors you should consider. For example, an athlete training for high-level competition would follow a different program than a person whose goals are good health and the ability to meet work and recreational needs.
Your exercise program should include something from each of the four basic fitness components described
previously. Each workout should begin with a warm-up and end with a cool-down. As a general rule, space
your workouts throughout the week and avoid consecutive days of hard exercise.
Here are the amounts of activity necessary for the average healthy person to maintain a minimum level of
overall fitness. Included are some of the popular exercises for each category.

Warm-up - 5-10 minutes of exercise such as walking, slow jogging, knee lifts, arm circles or trunk rotations.
Low intensity movements that simulate movements to be used in the activity can also be included in the
warm-up.

Muscular Strength - a minimum of two 20-minute sessions per week that include exercises for all the
major muscle groups. Lifting weights is the most effective way to increase strength.

Muscular Endurance - at least three 30-minute sessions each week that include exercises such as aerobics,
pushups, situps, pullups, and weight training for all the major muscle groups.

Cardiorespiratory Endurance - at least three 20-minute bouts of continuous aerobic (activity requiring
oxygen) rhythmic exercise each week. Popular aerobic conditioning activities include brisk walking, jogging,
swimming, cycling, rope-jumping, rowing, cross-country skiing, and some continuous action games like
racquetball and handball.

Flexibility - 10-12 minutes of daily stretching exercises performed slowly, without a bouncing motion. This
can be included after a warmup or during a cooldown.
 
Cool Down - a minimum of 5-10 minutes of slow walking, low-level exercise, combined with stretching.
Some activities can be used to fulfill more than one of your basic exercise requirements. For example, in
addition to increasing cardiorespiratory endurance, running builds muscular endurance in the legs, and
swimming develops the arm, shoulder and chest muscles. If you select the proper activities, it is possible to
fit parts of your muscular endurance workout into your cardiorespiratory workout and save time.

Clothing
All exercise clothing should be loose-fitting to permit freedom of movement and should make the wearer
feel comfortable and self-assured.
As a general rule, you should wear lighter clothes than temperatures might indicate. Exercise generates great
amounts of body heat. Light-colored clothing that reflects the sun’s rays is cooler in the summer, and dark
clothes are warmer in winter. When the weather is very cold, it’s better to wear several layers of light
clothing than one or two heavy layers. The extra layers help trap heat, and it’s easy to shed one of them if
you become too warm.
Never wear rubberized or plastic clothing, such garments interfere with the evaporation of perspiration and
can cause body temperature to rise to dangerous levels. The most important item of equipment for the
runner is a pair of sturdy, properly-fitting running shoes.

When to Exercise
Among the factors you should consider in developing your workout schedule are personal preference, job
and family responsibilities, availability of exercise facilities and weather. It’s important to schedule your
workouts for a time when there is little chance that you will have to cancel or interrupt them because of
other demands on your time.
You should not exercise strenuously during extremely hot, humid weather or within two hours after eating.
Heat and/or digestion both make heavy demands on the circulatory system, and in combination with
exercise can be an overtaxing double load.

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Importance of Health Psychology and Its Role in Today’s World

We are going to discuss the role of Health Psychology once again. It will be different this
time, though. Now that we have taken a good look into many of the important concepts in Health
Psychology, you will be in a better position to understand the remaining introduction of Health Psychology.
For example, if now we will talk about prevention, you will know what it is, and how many types of
prevention are there. Similarly, if we talk about promoting health, you will know what we mean by that. In
this way, we will try to summarize all important ideas of Health Psychology in this lecture. Not only will we
talk about the already discussed points, but also some more new ideas. Your benefits of becoming a Health
Psychologist, for instance; we will talk about the plus points of becoming a Health Psychologist and also the
possible future careers.

Let’s begin with the importance of Health Psychology and its role in today’s world. Many researchers
believe that physical health may be influenced by psychology through a variety of direct and indirect means.
There is some evidence that certain negative mental states (such as depression and anxiety) can directly
affect physical immunity through production of stress hormones, such as the chatelaines and
corticosteroids. Although this research is widely debated, there is also some indication that negative
psychological states may lead to faster disease progression in certain diseases (such as HIV and heart
disease) through these direct biological mechanisms. Negative emotional states may also indirectly affect
disease processes through their influence on health behaviors. For example, depression has been related to
many risk factors for poor health including overeating, smoking, physical inactivity, and poor medication
compliance.

In a nutshell, we can say that Health Psychology is “the use of psychological principles to promote
health and to prevent illness"; it is also part of clinical treatment for established illnesses”. This approach
considers the biological, cognitive, behavioral, emotional, social, psychosomatic and environmental factors
as they relate to health, illness and health care at the level of individuals. This approach has adopted what it
calls the Biopsychosocial model.

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Understanding Behavioral Factors in Health Psychology

Health psychologists seek to identify the behaviors and experiences that promote health, lead to illness,
influence the effectiveness of health care, and recommend improvements to health policy in their life. There
are many examples of this. Smoking, diet, and lack of regular exercise all contribute to the formation of
disease. There are some minor associations between illness and individual characteristics such as personality.
For example, it is claimed that individuals with thrill seeking personalities are more likely to drive fast,
making them more likely to injure themselves in car accidents. And also that people distrustful of physicians
will not get regular checkups.

Factors that lead to the behaviors that cause illness are of interest because they help psychologists to predict
who is most susceptible to illness and why. There are many contributing factors that help determine our
behaviors, and all of the dimensions of the Biopsychosocial model can be applied to understand these
interconnections. Biologically, physical addiction plays an important role in smoking cessation. As does the
psychological dependency on tobacco brought about largely by seductive advertising and other forms of
tobacco promotion. Psychologically, people with high stress jobs are more likely to develop cardiovascular
disease. Socially, people with low incomes have less access to health resources and screening processes.
They also are exposed to greater environmental toxigens, lower levels of education, poorer housing, less
healthy foods, higher smoking prevalence, and many other toxic socially determined living conditions.
Health psychologists also aim to change health behaviors for the dual purpose of helping people stay
healthy and helping patients adhere to disease treatment regimens. Cognitive behavioral therapy and
behavior modification are techniques often used for this purpose.

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Preventing Illness in Health Psychology

Psychologists work towards promoting health through behavioral change, as mentioned above, but they
prevent illness in other ways as well. Practitioners emphasize education as a large part of illness prevention,
as many people do not recognize the risk to illness present in their lives. Or they are unable to implement
the knowledge that they have owing to the pressures of their everyday existence. A common example of this
is anti-smoking campaigns. Those least able to afford tobacco products consume them the most. It is a
method for controlling emotional states, the daily experiences of stress that characterize the lives of
deprived and vulnerable people. Health psychologists also aim at educating health professionals like
physicians and nurses in communicating with patients. They communicate in a way that highlights the
psychosocial barriers to understanding and implementing effective strategies for reducing risk factors and
making behavior changes that will help them to develop appropriate means for communicating information
relevant to diagnosis, treatment and prognosis.

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Exploring The Effects of Disease in Health Psychology

There is much to know about how disease affects our mental well being. When illness or accidents befall a
person, their entire life is affected. A psychologically healthy individual who gets severely injured, say, now
has many different practical issues to contend with that will in turn affect their psychological well being.
Who will take care of them while they recover? If they can’t work, how will they pay for bills or care for
dependents? If this person sees themselves as being self-reliant, how do they handle this new identity? What
if they cannot pursue their usual hobbies and interests? All of these possibilities can affect a person’s
relationships, self-esteem, stress level, happiness and belief system. Many of these issues are economic and
social in nature rather than psychological but they have a direct impact on psychological well being.
This important field of study considers how those with terminal illnesses can lead a better life. When there
is little hope of recovery, health psychologists can improve the quality of life of the patient by helping them
to recover their mental well-being.

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Adherence to Medical Advice in Health Psychology

Getting People to obey medical advice and adhere to their treatment regimens is a difficult task for
health psychologists. Mostly, people forget to take their pills or find their side effects too difficult
to cope with, but failing to take prescribed medication costs very huge amounts of money per year,
as well as wasting millions of usable, viable medicines that could otherwise be used to help other
people.

Health Psychology focuses upon how biological, psychological, and social factors affect health and illness.
Many health psychologists perform on the best ways to promote healthy living and prevent disease and/or
how people react psychologically when they are diagnosed with an illness. Health psychologists are also
interested in patients' personality or attitude to see if it has a positive or negative effect on their health.
Health Psychology has become so involved in physical health and illness that medical centers have become
important employers of psychology majors today. Health psychologists study patients' coping strategies,
adjustment to their illness, and how they view their quality of life. The main focus today is why people do
certain things knowing that it can harm them in the end (e.g., why teenagers or adults smoke when they
know it causes cancer or even death).

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Five Major Aspects to Health Psychology

There are five major aspects to health psychology, in which each contribute to the overall existence of
health psychology. Health psychology contributes to our understanding of health and illness through
patients' adjustment to serious illnesses, their health beliefs, which influences their behavior, their mind and
body connection, and finally the psychosocial factors that can reinforce healthy behaviors and prevent
negative ones.

1. Mind-Body Connection
This includes the importance of peoples' adjustment following the diagnosis of a disease, death, or injury.

2. Psychological Adjustments
Psychological states, such as depression and anxiety, can alter immune function and other biological
processes, leading to poor health practice and diminished use of health care.

3. Preventing Disease
Health psychologists promote health and hope that in return it will prevent disease. There are many chronic
illnesses that can be prevented.

4. Optimism
An optimistic attitude and related behaviors are linked to better reports of physical health and faster
recovery from illness.

5. Social Support
Health psychologists have extensively studied the positive relationships between social support, mental
health, and physical health.

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Potential Attractions of Careers in Health Psychology

There are  Many Attractions for Potential Attractions of Careers in Health Psychology

Helping Others
It can be extremely rewarding when helping others cope with certain illnesses. A health psychologist can
actually save a person's life.

Promoting Health
By promoting health, one is educating people on how to take the best care of themselves. Health
psychologists are thus reducing peoples' risk of illness.

Challenging job
It can be very challenging when working with people that have extremely negative attitudes.

Team Environment
Health psychologists often work together with nurses, doctors, researchers, and other psychologists.

Job Opportunities
Job opportunities are expected to increase for those in the health field because of the enormous popularity
of the field and the growing geriatric population in the coming decades. Employment in psychology is
expected to grow about as fast as average for all occupations through 2010. Employment in health care will
grow the fastest in outpatient mental health and substance abuse treatment clinics. Numerous job
opportunities will also arise in schools, public and private social service agencies, and management
consulting services. Companies will use psychologists’ expertise in survey design, analysis, and research to
provide marketing evaluation and statistical analysis. The increase in employee assistance programs, which
offer employees help with personal problems, should also spur job growth.

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