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What are Body Conditioning Exercises?

Body conditioning is often used as synonymous with body strength training. While the two may overlap, conditioning is more extensive. The goal of strengthening is to improve muscular strength through exercises using various weights, such as body or free weights. On the other hand, body conditioning can be about building strength, but also focuses on whole body readiness for a competition or event with things like mental preparation, flexibility and endurance. Body conditioning is also used in physical therapy. It is common to still be a little confused about what are body conditioning exercises, so we’ll examine them a little more in depth below.

Physical Body Conditioning

Body conditioning on the physical level incorporates a whole range of elements. For mixed martial art fighters, it is important to condition their body to handle the many minor injuries that occur during a fight. Swimmers condition themselves to have fast reaction times off the starting block and walls. While marathon runners need to ensure they are conditioning their body to deal with the stress of extensive energy exertion. Common to all sports conditioning is the need for endurance along with power.

All the exercises used by physical therapist are body conditioning exercises. The exercises are used with a particular focus and are aimed to improve the body’s readiness for either everyday activities or sports recovery. These exercises, such as balancing on a stability ball, often focus on the smaller, stabilizing muscles which are often injured through accidents and poor training.

One type of conditioning that is often overlooked by athletes and the general public is flexibility conditioning. Everyone benefits from flexibility conditioning. Being flexible protects your body from injuries and helps your muscles work at their maximum potential; where as limited flexibility causes increased pain and stiffness in backs and joints.

Mental Body Conditioning

Proper body conditioning is a mental endeavor as well. The most common mental body conditioning exercise is visualization of the race or competition. By visualizing the outcomes and exact movements, athletes are training their bodies to complete those actions with little to no thought in the actual event. There have been scientific studies that have shown that by just thinking about various exercises dramatically improves and individual’s performance in it.

The benefits of mental body conditioning are monumental in physical therapy as well. Many of those ‘miracle’ success cases are due to the power of mental condition. The person visualized their success so strongly, that when combined with their physical conditioning efforts they actually did succeed in their goals.

Body conditioning exercises change depending on the person and the activities, but they all aim to improve performance.

Article by expert author ‘Emily Cordz’ for Outofstress.com