Is It Safe To Exercise Every Day?

Key Points

• Exercising every day has many advantages when done safely.

• The fear of pain or injury holds people back from exercising every day.

• Warm up, cool down, stretch, and set appropriate rest periods to work out daily safely. 

It's normal to have concerns about the safety of exercising every day, but daily exercise is beneficial when done appropriately. Exercise puts pressure on the body. If you're not mindful of your body's needs, working out every day causes pain and damage to muscles and joints.

When done safely, exercising every day unlocks a world of benefits and new opportunities. You look better, think more clearly, and are happier with at least 30 minutes of exercise daily. For all the time you spend scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, dedicate a few of those minutes each day to working up a sweat.

The Benefits of Exercising Every Day

Being active is one of the most remarkable ways to elevate your health. It improves, cures, and prevents several health conditions. There are both short-term and long-term benefits to daily exercise. 

Short-Term Benefits

Exercising every day reduces inflammation. Processed food, medications, and bacteria have toxins that cause inflammation in the body. Exercise increases blood flow, allowing the body to send white blood cells to areas in need of repair more quickly and efficiently, calming down swollen areas.

When you exercise, you sweat, and when you sweat, you lose water weight. The body stores extra water for protection against dehydration. Sweating allows the body to reduce that stored water, giving you a slimmer appearance. Many people even wear sweat belts that encourage the abdomen to sweat excessively.

Exercise boosts hormones in the brain responsible for improving mood, anxiety, and depression. Dopamine and serotonin flood the brain when you're active, leading to better moods and masking minor pain, stiffness, or other conditions. A quick 30-minute walk in the morning had the power to change the course of your entire day!

Long-Term Benefits

Exercising every day encourages your body to burn fat for energy. After a few weeks of steady exercise, the body burns fat stores which promotes weight loss.

Long-term exercise also improves muscle strength. During physical activity, you push your muscles to the point where microscopic tears, or microtears, happen. These microtears heal stronger than before, increasing muscle strength and size.  

Consistent exercise reverses several health conditions such as obesity and chronic pain. It also prevents the development of certain diseases. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention states that long-term exercise reduces your risk of developing dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, depression, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, and several types of cancer. 

Is It Safe To Exercise Every Day?

During exercise, muscles break down proteins into the bloodstream. If the body doesn’t have enough time to eliminate these proteins, they build up in the system and lead to rhabdomyolysis, a severe condition that causes muscle damage or death.

Not to fear! If you incorporate warm-ups, cool-downs, and rest periods appropriately, exercise is absolutely safe every day. 

Warm Up, Cool Down

If you go straight from rest to exercise, your muscles don’t have time to adapt to accommodate the forces applied. In turn, your muscles sustain damage. Going straight from exertion to resting is also an abrupt change for the body.

Prepare the body for exercise with a warm-up and help it return to normal with a cool down to get the most benefits from physical activity. 

Resting

Resting during exercise depends on your goal. If you want to increase endurance, rest periods between sets or movements must be short. Increasing muscle size and strength means incorporating more extended rest periods between sets of heavy resistance.

Resting between training is just as important as the training itself. Muscles don’t get stronger during exercise. They get stronger during the rest period when the microtears grow back more robust than before. Give your body more significant rest periods if you are doing multiple high-intensity exercises in a row. Lift weights Tuesday morning and wait until Wednesday night to do a Pilates class. Rest periods give you time to catch up on daily chores like laundry! 

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness (DOMS)

After strenuous exercise, you feel the most soreness around 48 to 72 hours later. The delay in soreness happens because during exercise, the body actively provides your muscles with the oxygen, blood, and nutrients they need for optimal performance. Once you're no longer exercising and your system returns to normal, the discomfort from the microtears creeps in.

It's vital to give your sore muscles attention. Sports therapy practitioner and running coach Nick Anderson says, “If you don’t get rid of that tightness and allow the muscle fibers to repair, you are more susceptible to injury for a period afterwards.”

DOMS is a common and natural occurrence. Treat tightness and painful side effects with a pain reliever, heat, and stretching.

Muscle Pain

Massaging muscles involves good pain and bad pain. Good pain is a mixture of pleasure and pain. Rubbing a sore muscle hurts because it’s filled with microtears, but it feels good because it reduces inflammation and pressure, increases blood flow, and allows more oxygen to reach the muscle. The brain also releases important hormones that reduce pain signals during muscle massages. 

If the pressure during a massage causes you distress or you desperately want it to stop, you are experiencing bad pain. Slow down on your exercises. Lower the time, alter the type, and decrease the tempo. If you don’t feel relief in four or five days, stop urinating, or your urine becomes dark yellow, ask a doctor about rhabdomyolysis. 

How Daily Exercise Affects Injuries

Exercising every day strengthens the muscles surrounding an injury. When you injure your body, other muscles compensate for that injured muscle and work even harder to make up for the weakened performance. Some people don’t experience pain right after an injury because other muscles are overcompensating.

For example, football players finish football games with a torn knee ligament. Muscles that support the ligament work harder to stabilize the knee. Eventually, those overcompensating muscles become overused and pressure returns to the injury. The muscles are no longer able to compensate, so the pain from the torn ligament emerges.

Muscles need time to rest and recover. When you exercise, the muscles use energy and repeatedly contract, causing fatigue. Your body needs blood flow and oxygen for recovery. Not giving your muscles enough time to heal leads to muscle strain, weakness, and pain. 

Avoid injuries by preventing muscle overuse. Mix up the types of workouts you do so you’re not overworking certain muscle groups. On Monday, do cardio. On Tuesday, lift weights. On Wednesday, do Pilates. Pick a new activity for each day so you get a well-rounded workout. 

Create a Workout Plan

There are many ways to incorporate exercise into your day. Exercise is any activity that involves movement and muscle contractions that increase your heart rate, breathing, and sweat production. That includes climbing a flight of stairs!

Create a workout plan that incorporates variability to avoid injury. Track your progress on certain apps to ensure you’re not working the same muscles back to back. Focus on time, type, and tempo to improve variability. 

Time

Overexerting yourself does more harm than good. Balance your exercise every day so you don’t exhaust certain parts of the body. A general rule of thumb is to do 30 minutes to an hour of physical activity each day.

Type

There are so many different kinds of exercise: running, lifting weights, yoga, dancing, aerobics, Pilates, etc. Different activities involve different muscles, movements, and body parts. Implement diversity into your exercise regimen to prevent muscle exhaustion, injury, burnout, and boredom.

Vary your workouts throughout the day. Take a 15-minute jog in the morning and lift weights for 15 minutes before bed. Spend an hour exercising on Monday if you know you don't have much time on Tuesday.

Tempo

Tempo is the level of intensity. A fast, challenging Thursday workout requires low-intensity, slower exercises on Friday and Saturday. Some higher-tempo practices include dancing, HIIT, and weight lifting while low-tempo exercises are those such as Tai Chi, yoga, and walking.

Vary tempo daily, but don't perform high-intensity workouts back to back. Perform high-tempo workouts two or three days in a row if they use different muscle groups, but then add in a lower-intensity day. Account for muscle soreness when scheduling your exercise activities.

Make Exercise a Habit

Exercising daily helps with self-discipline, time management, self-efficacy, motivation, and performance. You exercise your mind and spirit when you exercise your body. However, it’s often tough to summon up the motivation to exercise.

Many believe that it takes 21 days to establish a habit — after exercising for 21 days straight, you unconsciously build it into your day. Even if you stop working out every day, you've already developed healthy habits that last.

The desire to work out daily isn't always enough to win the battle against laziness. Develop good motivational tools to fight back against the urge to climb into bed instead of going to the gym.

Motivational Tips

Ask yourself why you want to exercise every day. What are three reasons you want to make this change in your life? Then, think of three outcomes you want from daily workouts. Last, determine how to reach those outcomes. Knowing why you want to exercise daily, what goals you want to reach, and how to get there keeps your eye on the prize. 

Here are some tried and true ways to get yourself motivated to exercise every day:

• Invite friends and family to join

• Listen to music, videos, or podcasts

• Create a workout plan

• Stay accountable

• Switch up your routine

• Reward yourself after a workout

Find what motivates you and stick with it. Keep an inspirational quote on your phone’s lock screen or even a picture of that new dress you’ve been dying to fit into. The best part about exercising every day is that it gives you more control over your day and life. 

What To Wear

Working out every day means changing your clothes every time you exercise. Wearing pajamas doesn't set the mood like gym shorts and tennis shoes, so wear clothing that motivates you to exercise.

Repeated movements in the wrong kind of attire irritate and chafe the skin. For example, running in shorts makes thigh chafing more likely while intense workouts in a sweatshirt increase your chance of developing a heat rash. Match your clothing to the type of exercise you're doing to prevent distractions and skin damage. 

Exercising every day is great until there's laundry every day. Re-wear specific articles of clothing on low-intensity days. Give clothes from workouts with less sweat a spray of fabric refresher and reuse. 

Hang up soaked clothes or put them directly in the wash to prevent mold and bacteria build-up. Leaving sweaty clothes balled up for days creates odor and mildew. Have a separate laundry basket specifically for workout attire.

Soon enough, these habits come naturally!

Take Control of Your Health

Take control of your mental and physical health with regular exercise. Working out every day benefits you in a myriad of ways, from improved stamina to better moods. However, a painful future awaits you and your muscles without a proper warm-up, cool-down, and recovery period. 

Exercising every day is about being mentally strong enough to say, “I am going to do this.” It requires a level of self-discipline that many in the world don’t possess. Take small steps to motivate yourself each day and eventually you develop healthy exercise habits that last a lifetime.

What exercise are you starting with today?