Exercises for Colon Health
- Jumping rope, walking and abdominal exercises are great ways to improve your colon health.Walking image by Towards Ithaca from Fotolia.com
The colon is an organ that can be overlooked when people are considering their health and fitness. However, colon health is esssential to overall well-being. Part of the large intestine, the colon is the last part of the digestive system. It extracts water and salt from solid wastes before they are eliminated from the body. Keeping your colon healthy and clean helps reduce your risk of colorectal cancer and irritable bowel syndrome, and aids in more efficient absorption of water and minerals. Improve your colon health by eating a healthy, fiber-rich diet with many fresh fruits and vegetables, drinking lots of water and doing certain physical exercises. - A 2007 study by the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis found that walking just an hour a week can help fight colon cancer. The study found that women who walked 1 to 1.9 hours per week were 31 percent less likely to develop colon cancer than those who did not walk at all. Walking for longer times also increased participants' chances of avoiding colon cancer.
Walking and running are good for your colon because these exercises increase blood flow to and from the intestines. Whatever level of exercise you are capable of, simply getting up and moving as much as you can improves your overall health, and specifically your colon's health. - Abdominal exercises are key to improving your colon health. Stronger abdominal muscles allow you to push matter more forcefully through the colon. Removing matter from your colon in a timely manner makes it less likely that harmful toxins will be trapped in your colon. Crunches and sit-ups are two basic exercises you can do to improve you abdominal muscles.
- Jumping rope is a very effective exercise to improve your colon health. It puts less strain on your joints than running but still gives you many of the benefits. Ten minutes of jumping rope is about the same as running an eight-minute mile. While the specific benefits of jumping rope have not been proven, it is believed that jumping up and down multiple times cleans and tightens the organs, especially the intestines. The increase in heart rate also gets the blood flowing throughout the body, which has health benefits for many different areas of the body, including the colon.
