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Femme power
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Regular exercise in adolescent years holds many physical and mental benefits for girls.
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MORE TEENAGE girls are taking part in sports than ever before, but the numbers represent only a tiny fraction of the adolescent female population. This is a pity because sports are as important for the physical and mental development of girls as they are for boys.
Like teenage boys, adolescent girls too tend to be insecure about their looks, and feelings of inadequacy and poor self-image birthed at this age tend to last a lifetime.
Regular exercise and participation in sports encourage positive feelings about body image. When a girl gets really good at a sport that she enjoys, it helps her build up a fund of feelings and experiences of competence, self-confidence and accomplishment that she can depend on for a lifetime. Regular exercise and sports counteract stress and depression, and they help flatten the emotional troughs that all teens go through. Regular exercise also improves intellectual abilities. Research suggests that girls who play sports do better on standardized tests, and they tend to do better in higher education in later years.
The physical benefits of exercise in adolescent years last for a lifetime. For starters, girls who exercise in their teen years are less likely to become obese in later years or suffer from hyperlipidemias. This in turn translates to a lower risk of suffering from coronary heart disease or some forms of cancer.
Adolescence and youth are the critical bone-building years for women because that is when the female skeleton attains its peak bone density. Since it is all downhill for bone density after age 30, bone-laying during teenage years become critical if one is to avoid osteoporosis in postmenopausal years. Regular exercise stresses the skeleton in a manner that forces bones to become stronger and denser. A youth spent playing hard increases the likelihood of an old age without fractures caused by osteoporosis.
An obsessive indulgence in exercise may be present in some teens with eating disorders, but on the whole exercise does more to combat eating disorders in teens by improving self-esteem and body image.
Parents of teenage girls who feel uncomfortable about the idea of their daughters playing sports must realise that exercise improves the odds of their daughters staying healthy well into old age. It is also the most certain way of increasing their daughters' lifespan. And that beats the trouble incurred in watching out for the wolves who hang around while adolescent girls play.
RAJIV. M
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