Physical activity does wonders for your health

Good health encompasses both physical and mental well-being. It’s not just about avoiding illness or frailty, but also about feeling joy and enjoying a good quality of life in your daily routine (1).

At Mia Health, we help you stay physically active and achieve good health on your own terms.

What is physical activity?

Physical activity is any movement that increases your heart rate. Or, to use the official definition: “any bodily movement produced by skeletal muscles that results in a significant increase in energy expenditure above resting levels” (2).

When physical activity is planned, regular, and carried out with a specific goal, it is called exercise (2).

This goal could be, for example, to become healthier and slimmer. It could be to feel more energetic and make daily life easier. Or it could be to perform better in a specific activity or over a certain distance.

Physical activity and exercise can indeed contribute to all of this. And it doesn’t take much. In this article, we’ll walk you through the health benefits you can expect from being physically active—both immediately, in the slightly longer term, and for the rest of your life.

Immediate effects

You experience health benefits from physical activity immediately after your first workout. A single session boosts your mood, sharpens your mind, and helps your body better manage harmful sugars and fats circulating in your bloodstream.

Sharpen your mind and reduce fatigue

You may have heard that exercise “gives you energy.” It is well documented that you feel more energetic after a workout (3). And this feeling of having more energy contributes to less exhaustion and fatigue (1).

In fact, the brain functions better immediately after a workout. Among other things, reaction time decreases, you’re able to make decisions faster, and your ability to execute tasks improves (4, 5).

So after a tiring day, it’s not a long evening on the couch that brings back your energy and creativity. A short, effective workout, on the other hand!

Reduces anxiety

During and immediately after physical activity, the release of happiness and reward hormones such as dopamine, serotonin, and endorphins increases (6). This may explain why self-esteem increases after being physically active. You feel happy and content. You simply develop a more positive outlook on life (7, 8)!

Immediately after exercise, you’re also less prone to anxiety in stressful situations (9).

In other words: A little physical activity before a job interview, an important sales meeting, or a crucial exam can make it a less stressful experience.

Reduces appetite and improves sleep

If you struggle to fall asleep at night, a short half-hour of physical activity can help. People with sleep problems fall asleep more easily, sleep longer, and enjoy better sleep quality if they’ve been physically active before bedtime (10).

If you smoke, keep in mind that physical activity counteracts the urge to smoke both during and for quite some time after the activity (11).

And if your goal is to lose a few pounds, it’s good to know that you actually feel less hungry after working out. A single workout affects the release of hormones that regulate appetite (12). As a result, you typically don’t eat more in the hours after exercising than you otherwise would have, even though you’ve burned more calories (13).

Risk factors decrease

Your body is healthier after just one session of physical activity. Insulin sensitivity increases immediately (14), so that sugar is absorbed into the cells instead of circulating in the blood. For people with diabetes, this acute effect lasts for up to three days (15).

A combination of high blood sugar, unhealthy fats in the blood, and high levels of inflammation can damage blood vessel walls (16). Fortunately, levels of harmful fats also drop sharply after exercise (17, 18, 19). Additionally, there is strong evidence that exercise has an immediate anti-inflammatory effect (20).

And that’s not all: In the hours following a workout, blood pressure drops (21), and blood vessels become more elastic (22).

Significant effects after just a few weeks

It’s amazing to think that after just a single bout of physical activity, the body begins to make changes that lead to better health! But these effects last only a few hours, or at best a couple of days.

The key to achieving long-term adaptations is therefore to repeat the exercise regularly. It doesn’t take many weeks of physical activity, however, before the chronic health benefits start to show.

Better mental health and quality of life

One of these benefits is better mental health. Good mental or psychological health means feeling good about oneself and experiencing joy and well-being in life. If you have good mental health, you have, for example, few symptoms of anxiety and depression, and you feel less stressed at work and in daily life.

A good exercise program can undoubtedly provide significant benefits for mental health (23, 24).

Among other things, several studies show that regular exercise leads to reduced panic attacks and less social anxiety (25, 26). Additionally, exercise over time can reduce symptoms of depression (27) and lower stress levels (28, 29).

Regular physical activity makes you less prone to constant mood swings (30). Specifically, this means you’ll feel less angry, confused, exhausted, and tense than you did before you started exercising.

When you take all this into account, it’s perhaps not so surprising that physically active people generally have a better quality of life than those who are inactive (31, 32).

A sharper brain

There are likely many reasons why exercise improves mental health. Some of them are linked to lasting changes that occur in the brain when you exercise regularly (33).

Among other things, exercise leads to the formation of new brain cells (34, 35) and new blood vessels in the brain (36). The result is better memory (37). In addition, we become more attentive and better able to learn new things (38).

And as we’ll come back to: The risk of developing dementia decreases significantly for people who are regularly physically active.

Lower risk of disease

A few months of structured exercise is sufficient to lower most of the common risk factors for lifestyle-related diseases. Blood pressure drops (39), and blood cholesterol levels become healthier (40, 41).

Exercise is also effective at lowering blood sugar (42), especially for those who need it most (43).

Regular exercise also promotes healthier blood vessels. The diameter of the large arteries that carry blood from the heart increases, allowing blood to flow more easily through them. Additionally, the blood vessels’ ability to dilate increases (44). Exercise stimulates the growth of new small blood vessels around our muscles, which makes the muscles better able to absorb oxygen and nutrients carried by the blood (45).

Stronger Muscles and Skeleton

Overweight individuals can lose a few pounds after just a few months of exercise (46). But for health’s sake, it is perhaps even more important to know that exercise can remove fat from the body and replace it with muscle mass, both for overweight individuals and those of normal weight (47).

Exercise not only gives the body larger muscles, but the muscles also become stronger. Although strength training is naturally the most effective way to become stronger, endurance training can also increase muscle strength (48). And being physically strong is closely linked to good mental health and a reduced risk of disease (49, 50, 51, 52).

And just to be clear: It’s never too late to start exercising. Even after the age of 75, strength training leads to a significant increase in muscle mass and muscle strength (53).

Like muscles, the skeleton becomes stronger with exercise. In both younger and older adults, bone density increases in both the spine and thigh bones after a period of exercise (54, 55).

Better fitness and a stronger heart

There is a very close link between high endurance capacity and good health and quality of life (56, 57, 58, 59). Regular endurance training is the most effective method for improving endurance capacity (60, 61), but for untrained individuals, strength training also has some effect (62).

One of the main reasons why high endurance capacity leads to good health is that it requires a strong heart. Endurance training causes the heart to pump blood more efficiently to the rest of the body (45). The heart grows stronger, pumps more blood with each beat, and fills more effectively with blood between beats (63).

Exercise can even reverse some of the impairments and damage we see in diseased hearts, such as after a heart attack (63). In addition, exercise lowers your resting heart rate and makes the natural variation in your heart rhythm from beat to beat healthier (64, 65).

Makes everyday tasks easier

With a stronger heart, stronger muscles, and a lighter body, the tasks you perform every day become easier (66, 67). You use a smaller portion of your maximum capacity when carrying groceries home from the store, jumping on the trampoline with your 4-year-old, moving heavy furniture into your new apartment, and when running to catch the bus.

For older adults, the risk of falls and bone fractures decreases (66, 68).

It goes without saying that all of this is important for quality of life (31, 32, 59).

Reduces the risk of many diseases

After a few months of regular physical activity, you may have reached your first activity goal. But fitness is a perishable commodity, and it doesn’t take many weeks of inactivity before you’ve fallen back to square one (69).

To achieve lasting changes in health and quality of life, you must repeat the activity over many years.

If you make physical activity a lifelong habit, you lay the foundation for a healthy old age and a long life.

Prevents cardiovascular disease and cancer

The list of diseases for which you can reduce your risk by being physically active is quite long. Physical inactivity is linked to an increased risk of at least 35 different chronic conditions (70).

This includes the vast majority of cardiovascular diseases, such as heart attack (71), high blood pressure (72), heart failure (73), stroke (74), and peripheral artery disease (75).

Obesity (76) and diabetes (77) can also be prevented by being physically active. The same applies to metabolic syndrome (78), which involves having both obesity and several other risk factors for cardiovascular disease.

Furthermore, at least ten types of cancer can be prevented by being physically active. These include colorectal cancer, breast cancer, lung cancer, uterine cancer, liver cancer, bladder cancer, and rectal cancer (79).

Prevents mental health disorders, dementia, and chronic pain

Physically active people are less likely to suffer from depression (80), anxiety (81), and cognitive impairments such as Alzheimer’s disease (82) and other types of dementia (83).

It is also worth noting that men and women who have been regularly physically active throughout their lives experience less physical pain (84). Physical activity prevents muscle loss as you age (85), and exercise also counteracts the development of osteoporosis (86), osteoarthritis (87), and rheumatoid arthritis (88).

Physical activity is medicine for the chronically ill

If you already have a chronic illness, there is no reason to stop exercising. Physical activity is effective medicine for at least 26 medical conditions (89).

Essentially, these are the same conditions that can be prevented through exercise. For example, exercise is effective in alleviating symptoms and improving the health of people with depression and anxiety, dementia, metabolic syndrome, cardiovascular diseases, COPD and other lung diseases, cancer, and various musculoskeletal disorders such as osteoporosis and arthritis (89).

As many have said before us: If physical activity were a pill, everyone would take it!

Adding life to years

Given all this, it comes as no surprise that people who remain physically active throughout their lives live, on average, many years longer than those who are physically inactive (70). Now, perhaps not everyone has a goal in and of itself to live to such a ripe old age, but we must remember what this implies:

Exercise delays aging and reduces the risk of all the major public health diseases (70). This means that not only do you live longer if you are physically active, but you also spend the final years of your life in better health and with a higher quality of life (90).

Doesn’t reaching 100 in good health sound better than turning 80 and living with failing health for the last decade of your life?

Mia Health aims to be your hub and helping hand for physical activity and good health for the rest of your life.

With us, physical activity becomes not just a lifestyle, but a fun one at that! If you start today, you’ll feel the effects already… yes, today!

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Anders Revdal

24 April 2026