What Happens to the Body and Muscles When Stopping Exercising?

Medical Video: How Does Exercise Impact Weight Loss?

Engaging in regular exercise will improve your overall health, mobility and stamina. This causes your body to better absorb vitamins, minerals, other nutrients, and also oxygen in your body. However, if after a variety of routine exercise you live, you then just stop, then your whole body also changes. What are the changes? Let's see more below!

Various changes that occur when stopping exercise

1. Soaring blood pressure

This effect occurs in the short term and instantly. Your blood pressure will be higher when you do not exercise, compared to when you actively exercise. Your blood vessels adapt to slow blood flow only after 2 weeks of stopping exercise. Within a month, stiff arteries and veins send your blood pressure back to where you were when you did not do any movement, according to Linda Pescatello, Ph.D., of the University of Connecticut.

2. Blood sugar skyrocketed

A less mobile life causes your glucose levels to increase. This can cause you to be at risk for heart disease and diabetes. When you stop training, muscles and other tissues cannot absorb sugar for energy. As a result, your blood sugar rises sharply. This can happen even after 5 days you are not active. All of this can produce your stomach that starts to bulge due to the disappearance of the potential for fat burning and slowing metabolism. However, if you exercise again for one week, your blood sugar levels will decrease, this also applies to people who have type 2 diabetes, according to Dr. James Thyfault from the University of Missouri.

3. Muscle degeneration

If you change from being very active to being inactive, you are actually still considered healthy by a sports physiologist, but you will be labeled "deconditioning". So, if you stop exercising for any reason, you will feel a negative impact. Muscle atrophy will take over, so you will begin to experience joint and ligament problems. Your body starts losing muscle, and develops muscle atrophy, especially if you are used to resistance training. How fast you lose muscle mass depends on your age. The older you are, the faster you will lose muscle.

Usually quads and biceps shrink faster. Even if you are not a trained athlete, Dr. Harry Pino said that in 10-28 days you will see muscles lose strength and power, including speed, agility, mobility, moving from side to side, and also coordination. In about a week, your muscles will lose some fat burning potential and slow metabolism. As a result, fat starts to increase and cover your muscles.

4. Loss of strength

When you stop exercising, your physical endurance will disappear. Power loss usually occurs after two and a half to three weeks of inactivity, according to Molly Galbraith, a certified strength and condition expert. A study conducted by the University of Murcia, Spain, Faculty of Sports Sciences, entitled Physiological Effects of Tapering and Detraining in World Class Kayakers, indicating that the short-term results of exercise cessation are the magnitude of the decrease in muscle strength and endurance of the athlete.

5. The brain suffers

Just two weeks after stopping exercise, people who exercise regularly turn out to be someone who is easily tired and irritable, according to a study in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity. Although the evidence is small in humans, research in mice presented by the Society for Neuroscience shows that animals that stop moving for a week have little growth in brain cells, and also do labyrinth tests worse than those in stable routines.

6. Weight gain

Within a week, your muscles will lose some of the potential for fat burning and slowing down metabolism, according to Paul Arciero, D.P.E., a sports science lecturer at Skidmore College. In his findings, published in the Journal of Strength & Conditioning Research, stopping exercise for 5 weeks pushed the fat mass of a swimmer in college as much as 21%.