On a cellular level, how does exercise make us healthy or improve our health?
In: Biology
In muscles, cells physically grow larger (hypertrophy) and move of them develop. When these muscle cells contract and relax they are capable of carrying a lot more force, which results in heavier objects (including the weight of your own body) being able to be moved easier (less calories spent) and increases the upper limit of what the muscle can support. This needs protein which is why a lot of athletes take protein shakes to supplement their diet with extra protein.
The cells also become better at absorbing nutrients from the bloodstream and expelling waste into the bloodstream or endocrine system to be filtered and removed by other organs so waste doesn’t build up in your cells. The cells can also store more ATP which is the raw chemical substances in food consumed by the mitochondria within your cells and that produces the energy to keep our bodies running, so bigger and better cells mean more energy stored meaning more energy produced. The cells can also consume resources more efficiently so your body uses less calories and can store more fat (the body ALWAYS wants to store fat, and it will deconstruct muscle tissue to build fat if you are on a cut, ie running a calorie deficit in order to lose weight). This goes for your heart too, so a stronger heart beats more slowly because it can exert more force per beat while saving energy in order to push blood around your body.
Good form in exercise is essential because this makes ganglia develop. Ganglia are small nerve clusters, basically the local authority for your nervous system, which are directly responsible for moving a specific set of muscles or limb. The better your form is, the more this ganglia develops, resulting in more precise and efficient movement which further saves energy and makes the muscles stronger. Dancers and ballerinas have incredibly developed ganglia and are very strong even though they tend to have smaller frames because their bodies are very highly co-ordinated.
All of this working together helps produce hormones and neurotransmitters. These are drugs your body produces to control your behaviour and bodily processes. GABA, serotonin, and dopamine have many many functions but their most important functions are making you happy, regulating sleep, digestion, and reduces the peaks and troughs in mood making your mood more stable. This is why exercise directly improves mental and emotional health. You also do most of your growing and healing while you’re asleep, so more exercise = more neurotransmitters = better sleep = better recovery from exercise, sickness, stress, etc.
Hormones like testosterone (produced in significant amounts by men but are only in trace amounts in women) are steroids which further promote muscle growth and development, which is why men are naturally stronger than women. Hormones produced by both sexes as a result of exercise increases sex drive, the health of the sex organs and sex cells, which results in better quality children (that said there is a significant amount of genetic and environmental effects that have a far larger impact on foetal development than exercise). Hormones also make other tissues like bone and cartilage and skin grow collagen (a dense elastic substance) which makes your bones bend rather than break (and when bone with high collagen does break it breaks cleanly rather than shatters which is far easier to heal) and your skin is tougher and firmer and can store more water, resulting in better looking and functioning skin.
Exercise isn’t very resource hungry. The human body is extremely efficient and you would have to run several marathons in order to run off a single cheeseburger. For that reason, athletes and dieters “cut” which is where they remove a meal and count calories because your body burns fat just by existing. It’s not recommended for fat or obese people to run because of the immense pressure that puts on their joints–lose weight at the dinner table first, then exercise. When people feel tired after exercising it is because they’ve used up their ATP reserves (the chemical energy used by cells). The body will eventually produce more ATP, but the more exercise you do the faster you will produce ATP, the more you can store, the less your cells will use, overall resulting in more exercise achievable and less effort being spent. Supplements like creatine are the raw amino acids which your body uses to make ATP, so athletes often take creatine to increase the amount of exercise they can do. Creatine isn’t a steroid, the amino acids are what your body tears food apart in order to use as fuel so creatine is a concentrated supplement of these amino acids to make ATP.
All of this adds up to make your body faster, stronger, tougher, and more efficient, as well as looking better and being resistant to damage from which is what we mean when we say “healthy”.
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