Health Benefits

Health benefits of running include reducing your risk of heart disease and stroke, boosting self-esteem and reducing your risk of Alzheimer’s disease. It can help you to live longer and healthier.

What are the health benefits from running?

Mind

• Mood-boosting effects: when you run you release two powerful feel-good chemicals, endorphins and endocannabinoids.
• Meditation time: can boost your gray matter, improve focus, fight depression and anxiety.
• Depression: physical activity acts as an effective alternative (not a substitute for a trained professional) *3
• Improve memory: exercise that gets your heart rate up and makes you sweat boosts the area in the brain that is involved with verbal memory and learning, these positive effects may counteract Alzheimer’s symptoms. *5

Body

• Heart: Running 5-10 minutes a day, at slow speed drastically reduces the risk of dying from cardiovascular disease. *1
• Strengthen your joints: runners were half as likely to suffer from knee osteoarthritis compared with walkers, it does not increase the risk.*2
• Calorie Burning: Running requires a lot of fuel, an average person will burn about 12.2 calories per minute.
• Muscle changes: Your body’s biggest muscles are all in your legs, and running is advantageous to all of them: thighs, buttocks (especially gluteus maximus), quads, hamstrings, and calves.
  • Core: running challenges your rectus abdominis, as well as the deeper core muscles, including your obliques, erector spinae, and transverse abdominis. 

Lifestyle

• You can always fit in a run: running can be fitted in easily. Run to work, only have 10 minutes to spare, whatever your workout constraints.
• Pat of a community: runners form a strong support network, join a running club, enter park runs, and online groups. 
• No experience required: everyone can run, there are no dance moves to learn or poses such as in yoga. 
• Quick benefits: a small amount of running (50 minutes per week) can produce all the health benefits discussed. You don’t have to run marathons (but you can if you want) *6.

Help you live longer: with all the health benefits of running you can live longer. Runners have a 25 – 40% lower risk of premature mortality and live an average of three years longer than non-runners.*4

Still thinking about running? Ready and want to know how?

Thinking about running study References:

1. https://www.jacc.org/doi/full/10.1016/j.jacc.2014.04.058
2. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23377837/
3. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3674785/
4. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28365296/
5. https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/49/4/248.abstract?sid=ecff0a48-d4fd-4a9d-b34a-156ca915a79e
6. https://www.mayoclinicproceedings.org/article/S0025-6196(15)00621-7/pdf

• Shape.com
• parkrun
• NHS Live well