Benefits of Jogging: 6 Reasons You Should Jog Right Now

Confession. We all want to be fit and healthy. We all know jogging is a good workout for that because there are so many benefits of jogging. But, we still make the same mistakes over and over again……

Took off your shirts and flexed your muscles and made a post in front of the mirror? – Let’s face it, we ALL did this.

We wish to look great in front of the mirror. But, we usually get overwhelmed by the belly fat and our love handler.

Also, we hope to have the slim and toned body like those in the fitness commercials. We know workout and diet are the two main keys to have a healthy and slim body.

However, it is always easier to start with the diet. And, it is not surprising that there are various types of diets to lose fat and make us slim.

And yet, we are reluctant to MOVE our body and workout. – Who doesn’t wish to lose fat while lying on the couch?

Sounds familiar, huh? Well, move your body is not that difficult. You don’t have to sign up a gym membership yet. Initiate your first move. It’s time to consider jogging if you really want to be fit and healthy.

Here, I’m gonna show you 6 benefits of jogging that you should start jogging right away!

1. Physical Health Benefits

Jogging is an aerobic cardio exercise. Amongst the benefits of jogging, people jog mainly for the physical healthy benefits. The common physical health benefits are:

Weight loss

Jogging is one of the most popular exercises when it comes to weight loss. You realize how sweaty you are when you are jogging and even after you finished jogging.

Generally, you will burn around 400 to 700 calories for a 1-hour jogging, depending on the intensity and your weight. – That is roughly the calories of a McDonald Big Mac!

Imagine if you jog daily for a year and you do the simple math, you have burned around 146,000 to 255,500 calories. These are TONNES of fats that you have burned in a year!

Improve your stamina

When you start jogging, you don’t really feel anything. Then, you start to feel your heart pumping harder and your breath is getting more frequent and deeper.

When jogging, your body needs more oxygen. Your lungs start to work harder and you breathe more and deeper to get more oxygen. Your heart also works harder to pump the blood to the lungs and the brain to deliver the oxygen to the whole body.

That is why, usually when you just start jogging, you do feel a bit out of breath. But, after you jog for a while, you feel energized and feel you can continue jogging longer and farther.

Our body is excellent: the more we use it, the better it gets. If you jog consistently, you’ll notice your stamina gets betters. Your heart muscle gets stronger and your lungs capacity improves. This makes more efficient oxygen delivery.

Strengthen your leg muscle

When we are running, our legs have to withstand the force of 5 to 12 times of our weight for EACH stride, depending on the speed and form. – Talk about thousands of strides and huge amount of force that our body withstands for each jogging session.

You may feel your leg muscle sore for a few days after your first few jogging sessions. But, it is TOTALLY common and you don’t have to worry too much. After a few more jogging sessions, you’ll find the soreness getting lesser and lesser.

Unlike sprinting, jogging stimulates the slow-twitch muscle. You wouldn’t get muscular leg most probably (yet), but you will notice you get less tiring by climbing the staircases or walking long distance.

Your stronger heart, better lung capacity and also your stronger leg muscle form the basic recipe for more intense and stronger run!

Sleep better at night

I’m not sure whether you have the experience where you’ve done any workout, you feel tired and you sleep more soundly at night? – I have actually.

After jogging, you’ll feel relaxed and have a great relief with all the sweat. In fact, aerobic exercise will raise the body temperature and reset the sleep wake cycle. When the body temperature drops, you’ll feel sleepy.

So, if you have sleeping problem, let’s try this to reset your sleep wake cycle. See if this helps.

2. Mental Health Benefits

I’m pretty sure you have come across where you feel your mood is elevated after your workout.

Jogging is the same. In fact, some joggers / runners experience Runner’s High – a great sense of achievement / satisfaction which creates an instant boost of mood after a jog / run.

Runner’s High may not be a placebo effect. In fact, there are 2 school-of-thoughts trying to explain this:

• Some scientists believe that this is due to ENDORPHINS – a type of hormone secrete when we exercise. This hormone relieves stress and pain, and these have the similar effect to create positive mood.

• Researchers, however, argue that endorphins is too big to pass through the blood-brain barrier – which means we feel happy NOT because of endorphins. In fact, it is caused by ENDOCANNABINOIDS, a biochemical substance which can pass through the barrier between the blood stream and the brain, and it can improve neuromodulators, which makes us feel happy.

Regardless of which arguments prevail, it is undeniable that jogging provides stress relief and instant elevation of mood.

In fact, jogging also has long-term mental benefits. If you jog / run consistently, new blood vessel growth is stimulated to the brain and your focus and memory will be improved. – See, jogging can even improve your study or work performance.

3. Flexible

Literally, you can even stop reading and close this post, and go for a jog RIGHT NOW! – This is great, but I hope you finish reading this post, as least. Haha!

The benefits of jogging don’t just includes benefits for physical and mental health, it also provides great flexibility. Meaning, you can jog anywhere. – Open car park, road, pavement, lawn, grass, trail, treadmill etc.

That is the perk of jogging. Unlike other sports or recreational activities, it is so flexible that you don’t need to jog at the specific location. You can either jog alone or in a group.

You can jog in the morning, at night, midnight, afternoon. – Whatever time you like and feel convenient. Or, you can even jog under the rain! 

In spite of this, there are two common jogging sessions that you can consider.

Morning jogging routine

Yeah, you hear it right. That could be a nightmare for a night owl person.

But, let’s look at how our body works. You realize that when you wake up in the morning, your whole body is stiff and your mind is still groggy. You want to get back to sleep again.

But, you need to get up and get ready for the hectic life: your breakfast, works, meeting, deadline, study, etc. And this requires your brain and your body to be aroused and stay alert.

You even feel your heart pumping when you think of this. Our body needs transition for this. But, you can prepare for this transition. – Jogging certainly.

This is why morning jogging routine is so popular to jumpstart our life. Many professional runners have morning running routine for training purposes.

A short jogging session, 30 minutes perhaps, is good enough to prepare for your day and to be productive. And, you’ve already completed an achievement BEFORE your day starts. This will make you feel confident and mentally prepared for your upcoming tasks.

The Guardian’s Weekend revealed that Victoria Beckham has a morning run routine. She wakes up between 5.30am and 6am and starts her 7km treadmill running session, followed by personal training workout session.   

You can give it a try, see whether this fits you.

After-work jogging routine

Ok, it’s fine if you couldn’t adjust to morning jogging routine. – Let’s try after-work jogging routine.

After-work routine provides you greater flexibility in planning your jog. You are not under time constraint because your important works are already done. Well, you can jog however fast or slow you want. Or, you can even have a long jog.

Instead of “jumpstart” your mind, after-work jogging does the opposite – to relax your mind and just enjoy the jogging.

I believe you feel damn tired and just want to stay on couch after your hectic life. But, let’s stay up and give yourself a chance to jog. – You’ll sweat like a pig and you’ll definitely feel an instant relief and love the uplift of your mood.

4. Free

Why free? Because you can jog with your regular shoes. You can consider buying a nice quality pair of running shoes after you are into jogging / running.

Also, unlike other sports, the entry level of jogging is so low. Why? Because even baby can run after they learn how to walk.

Basically, you can start jogging immediately and once you are into jogging routine, you can fine tune your running posture and technique. – Don’t wait to perfect your technique and posture BEFORE you start jogging because you only can improve them AFTER you start jogging.

Or, why not try running BAREFOOT? It may sound crazy and odd to you.

But, animals walk and run barefoot, don’t they? And they always sprint much faster than us. We, as human beings, care about the design of the running shoes to improve our running efficiency, and yet we are much slower than them.

I’m not encouraging you to jog on the asphalt, gravel or rocky trail. You actually can try jogging barefoot on soft surface, like grass or running circuit track. You’ll feel your jog much lighter without the weight of your shoes.

And, some runners like to run barefoot because this allows them to pay attention to and improve their foot landing.

5. Mentally strong

When you start jogging, there are a lot of negative thoughts in your mind. Your mind tells you “it’s so great to just stop”, “you don’t have to work so hard”, “it’s fine to give up”…. – IKR, it’s so tempting to give up!

But, that is the time to train your mind. You learn to be tougher and mentally stronger.

Even when you finish 1km jog, you should celebrate and be proud of yourself because you fight against your negative thought and achieve this! – Your persistence and mental strength accumulate from this.

In 2016, Mark Zuckerberg completed his personal challenge to run 365 miles in that year, and he completed five months earlier than his target. – This is really achievable for a strong mental person with high self-discipline and persistence.

I remember the world was so hype when Eliud Kipchoge, a Kenyan runner, ran a marathon under two-hour barrier in 2019, a barrier which is deemed as human limit at that time. Although it isn’t an official world record, it is still remarkable because it represents the unlimited power of human.

Mental strength for marathon

Well, have you thought of running a full marathon as your new-year resolution, even you are not a runner at all?

This seems distant. But, you CAN achieve it if you prepare both mentally and physically! In fact, if you train strategically, you just need to use around 12 to 20 weeks to prepare for a full marathon.

Believe it or not. Human beings are born runners, although we couldn’t run as fast as dogs, cats, or leopard.

Look at ourselves. We don’t have much hair as compared to other mammals. We have developed sweat glands. And most importantly, we use two feel to walk and run. – These are the unique characteristics designed to run long distance without overheat!

6. Complement to other sports / activities

If you are into sports like football, basketball, kayaking, swimming, what would you do to improve your performance? You’ll probably need to consider jogging.

As what you have read above, jogging is certainly one of the great ways to improve you stamina. Thus, jogging is always included as part of the training or drills for the athletes. – One of the benefits of jogging which is important for athletes and yet is always overlooked.

This is because jogging improves your stamina and this is essential in any sports that you concern.

I am a hiker. And I have to admit that jogging improves my stamina and it makes me hike more effortlessly and faster. In fact, I think both complement each other. As we hike more, jogging also becomes easier and more enjoyable.

In fact, Beyoncé took this to the next level. “My father, who was also my manager, made me run a mile while singing so I would be able to perform on stage without becoming exhausted,” she said in an interview.

And, what is the result? Whether you like her music or not, she is undeniably a very steady live performer with solid singing technique and dancing skills.

Final thought on benefits of jogging

Jogging is a very basic and common exercise with so many benefits of jogging. Everyone should consider jogging to be healthy and improve the sports performance.

It is flexible that people can decide where and what time to jog. People also can decide whether they want to jog alone or what kind of running shoes to wear. – They can even consider barefoot jogging.

People may dislike jogging because of the long distance and hour exercise. But, if you start to jog, you will start to change your mind because you realize you are achieving breakthrough for EVERY stride you take. – You are improving your health and more importantly, you are improving your mental strength.

There are so many benefits of jogging which you shouldn’t have any excuse of not moving your body! Once jogging becomes your habit, you’ll be “addicted” to this and you realize you should start jogging much earlier.

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