What happens to your body and muscles when you stop exercising?

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

Various changes that occur when you stop exercising

1. Blood pressure is soaring

This effect occurs in the short term and instantaneously. Your blood pressure will be higher when you are not exercising, compared to when you are actively exercising. 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 where it should be when you don't make any movement at all, according to Linda Pescatello, Ph.D., of the University of Connecticut.

2. Blood sugar skyrocketed

Living in motion causes your glucose levels to rise. This can put you at risk for heart disease and diabetes. When you stop exercising, your muscles and other tissues can't absorb sugar for energy. As a result, your blood sugar rises sharply. This can happen even after 5 days of inactivity. All of this can result in your belly starting to bulge as a result of losing its fat burning potential and slowing down your metabolism. However, if you do the exercise again for one week, then the 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 go from very active to inactive, you will still be considered healthy by the exercise physiologist, but you will be labeled "deconditioned." So, if you stop exercising for any reason, you will feel the negative impact. Muscle atrophy will take over, so you will start having joint and ligament problems. Your body begins to lose muscle, and develops muscle atrophy, especially if you have become accustomed to resistance training. How quickly you lose muscle mass depends on your age. The older you get, the faster you will lose muscle.

Usually the quadriceps and biceps shrink more quickly. Even if you are not a trained athlete, Dr. Harry Pino says that in 10-28 days you will see your muscles lose strength and power, including speed, agility, mobility, side-to-side movement and coordination. Within a week or so, your muscles will lose some of their fat burning potential and slow down their metabolism. As a result, fat starts to add up and covers your muscles.

4. Losing strength

When you stop exercising, your physical endurance will diminish. Losing strength usually occurs after two and a half to three weeks of inactivity, according to Molly Galbraith, a certified strength and conditions expert. A study conducted by the School of Sports Science at the University of Murcia, Spain, entitled Physiological Effects of Tapering and Detraining in World Class Kayakers , indicating that the short-term outcome in stopping training was a large reduction in muscle strength and endurance for the athlete.

5. The brain suffers

Just two weeks after stopping exercise, a person who exercised regularly turned into someone who was irritable and irritable, according to a study in the journal Brain, Behavior, and Immunity . Although the evidence in humans is scanty, studies on mice are presented by Society for Neuroscience , showed that the animals that stopped moving for a week had less brain cell growth, and also performed worse on the maze test than those on a steady-walking routine.

6. Weight gain

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