Gentle Yet Effective: The Benefits of Low-Impact Workouts
Some of you may find that your back, hips, knees or ankles often hurt when you’re training and this shouldn’t be the case.
This could be down to many different reasons (too many for us to list), but a large and common one is that you may have too much high-impact exercise included in your session and it may be unknowingly building up damage.
Regardless of the reason, today’s edition of the Elevate Blog will be helpful for you as it is focused on diving into the world of “low-impact workouts”!
Low-impact workouts can be useful for all ages and capabilities, particularly so as you become older or develop injuries, ailments or conditions. It offers many benefits, some of which will be more obvious than others and we have listed 5 of them below for you!
Cardiovascular Health and Muscular Endurance
Low-impact exercise such as walking, cycling or swimming has the benefit of improving not just your cardio by improving how well your heart, lungs and blood vessels work, but it can also help to build the muscular endurance of various areas! This is increased even further if you include specific low-impact exercises such as bodyweight squats or crunches!
Injury Prevention and Joint Health
When you take part in low-impact exercise regularly, you can improve the strength of your joints without stressing them. This in turn means that you can drastically reduce the risk of injuring yourself (nobody enjoys it when they roll an ankle)!
Weight Management
Like with any other types of exercise, when you take part in low-impact exercise it helps to burn calories and reduce your fat levels / stops you from putting on more. Although it is largely down to diet, exercising more can give you further leeway with it!
Sustainability
There are two large reasons why it is more sustainable, the first is that it causes less strain on the joints and body as a whole so that you can do more of it before you have to stop. The second reason is that because it causes less damage, you can recover from it faster, which means that you can then train more frequently and have less side effects (like a rolled ankle, not many people enjoy being achy after a workout - which is called D.O.M.S)!
Improved Form and Technique
When you include more low-impact exercise in your routines, it gives you a larger opportunity to improve your form and technique. This is because this type of exercise is typically slower and more controlled, therefore making it much easier to spot any mistakes and correct them!
