11 Benefits of Jumping Jacks That Will Have You Jumping All Day

If you have ever wondered why it is that people do jumping jacks, other than looking funny jumping in place, there is actually a pretty good reason for it, or more accurately there are 11 reasons for it. There are many different benefits of jumping jacks that you may not know about, each of which can go a pretty long way in making you a much healthier person.

If you have never tried doing a set of jumping jacks before, after you have given this a read, you might just change your mind!

Benefit #1: They Are Free To Do

One of the benefits of jumping jacks that cannot be overlooked is that they are free. There are dozens or even hundreds of different types of exercises out there, and most of them can cost a whole lot of money to engage in.

Playing any kind of team sport automatically costs several hundred dollars per year, home gym equipment is pricey, and even gym memberships end up being quite expensive in the long run. However, you do not need any money to do jumping jacks.

You don’t need to buy any special equipment to do jumping jacks. Heck, you don’t even have to buy exercise shoes if you don’t want to, or clothes for that matter. As long as you are in your own home you can do jumping jacks butt naked if you so choose. Now that is going to save you money!

How to Do a Jumping Jack | Boot Camp Workout

Benefit #2: They Are Great Cardiovascular Exercise

There is no doubt that one of the best parts of doing jumping jacks on a regular basis is that they are great for your heart and for your lungs, or in other words, for your cardiovascular health. Have you ever tried doing 50 jumping jacks? Try it and we guarantee that your heart will be pumping really fast when you’re done, not to mention that you will probably need to catch your breath too.

Of course, that is a good thing because jumping jacks train your heart and lungs to become stronger every time you do them. Your heart and lungs get stronger and more efficient just like the rest of your muscles do when you exercise.

Training your heart to be stronger has some great benefits including a lower resting heart rate and lower blood pressure, which means that it is not working as hard to pump blood around your body, thus increasing its longevity.

Not only that, but a healthy heart also has the ability to deliver more blood throughout your body in times of need, with one of those times being during physical exercise. More blood being delivered to your muscles means getting more nutrients and oxygen that they need to keep lifting those dumbbells.

A healthier heart also helps with reducing the chances of suffering from a stroke or heart attack, it lessens the chances of developing heart or arterial disease, and it helps with cholesterol control, as well as diabetes too. Having a healthy heart is absolutely vital to your health.

Then there are the lungs which also benefit greatly from cardiovascular activity such as jumping jacks. To put it simply, jumping jacks will slowly train your lungs to be able to absorb more oxygen, process more of it, and send it to your muscles and the rest of your body.

More efficient lungs means that your muscles will be able to work for longer because they’re getting that oxygen that they so direly need. Plus there’s the point that you won’t get winded nearly as fast when exercising, or maybe just walking up a few flights of stairs. The bottom line is that a healthy cardiovascular system is crucial to a long life, and just a few jumping jacks can help you achieve that.

Benefit #3: You Can Do Them Anywhere

Jumping jacks are a very versatile type of exercise because you can do them virtually anywhere, which is of course a pretty big bonus. With jumping jacks you aren’t forced to go to the gym at a certain hour of the day to avoid the crowds or to make your spinning class.

With jumping jacks, you aren’t forced to get on your bicycle and ride along a certain route because there’s too much traffic along a certain street. You also aren’t forced to stand on a treadmill in front of your TV in a boring living room.

That is the beauty of doing jumping jacks, because you can do them in your living room, bedroom, basement, front or backyard, at the park, in your office, or even at the gym too. Not having to be confined to one single space to do an exercise is definitely an advantage.

You can get a change of scenery so you don’t get bored, a problem that often plagues working out, and you can do them at any time of day, and you can do them in any place. That is not something that you can say for virtually any other type of exercise.

Benefit #4: They Increase Coordination

Yet another benefit of doing jumping jacks on the regular is that they will over time help you increase your coordination. This is because doing jumping jacks requires a decent amount of coordination and as the case with pretty much anything to do with humans, if you do something enough, you will get better at it.

The same goes for your coordination. By having to constantly coordinate a jumping outwards motion combined with raising and lowering your hands, you are using, and thus training your coordination to become better.

Nobody is going to argue that having better coordination is a useful thing. If you play sports of any kind you will undoubtedly need hand-eye coordination to either hit or kick a ball, to throw something, to catch something, or whatever the case may be.

You also need coordination for simple little things like walking up stairs, cutting an onion, or even scratching your nose. It’s a really important skill that we all need to have, a skill you can get better at by doing jumping jacks.

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Benefit #5: They Help Build Stronger Muscles

We aren’t going to lie to you and tell you that jumping jacks are as good for building muscle as lifting heavy weights, but they certainly don’t hurt. In fact, jumping jacks can be pretty useful in terms of building bigger and leaner muscles, especially when you do a whole lot of them.

First off, when you do jumping jacks, you swing your arms from a hanging position to up above your head. Therefore you are training the muscles in your arms to slowly become stronger. It may not seem like much, lifting your arms into the air without any weight, but it will get your arms bigger than if you weren’t doing anything at all.

On a side note, if you want to increase the arm muscle building effects of jumping jacks, you can always wear wrist weights or even hold dumbbells too. Who doesn’t want stronger arms? We sure do. They’re great for many things like lifting said dumbbells, carrying your kids, or for flexing when someone takes a picture of you.

On that same note, jumping jacks of course involve jumping, and that means that you are strengthening your leg muscles when you do them. Your glutes, hamstrings, quads, calves, and the rest of your leg muscles all benefit from jumping jacks.

Not only do stronger legs mean that you look better in shorts, but it also means that you will be able to stand for longer periods of time, you will be able to run faster, and jump higher too. Having stronger legs, and stronger arms for that matter, will help improve your physical performance no doubt.

There is also the fact that having more developed leg muscles also assists in improving your balance, something that gets more important the older you get. Strong leg muscles can make the difference between falling or catching yourself when you slip. We all like having stronger muscles because we look better, feel better, and we can exert ourselves to a whole new level.

Benefit #6: Assisting In Weight Loss

Another big benefit that you can get from doing jumping jacks on a daily basis is that they can help you lose a pretty serious amount of weight. In all reality, while jumping jacks may look like a really easy exercise to do, they are in fact quite strenuous. Doing a lot of jumping jacks for a prolonged period of time will definitely burn some calories.

Try doing a few hundred jumping jacks. You will definitely work up a sweat and you will probably start to feel hungry pretty quickly afterward too. The simple fact is that it takes energy to do any kind of physical exercise and that includes jumping jacks. Whenever you use energy to exercise your body uses calories from the food that you have eaten.

Now, if you haven’t eaten all that much and your body does not have an adequate number of calories that it can convert into energy, it will resort to eating up fat reserves to keep jumping those jacks. You know what that means. It means losing weight.

There is another weight loss benefit that you get from doing jumping jacks, which is an increased metabolic rate. Most kinds of exercise increase your metabolic rate, or in other words, the rate at which your body consumes calories or eats away at your fat reserves.

The more you exercise by doing something like jumping jacks the more your metabolism gets revved up and the longer it stays that way for. Even when you stop exercising your body will continue to burn an increased number of calories, thus greatly assisting in your weight loss goals.

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Benefit #7: They Are A Bone Builder

The next benefit that your body reaps from doing jumping jacks has to do with your bones. You see, you can train your bones to be bigger and stronger much in the same way as you do for your muscles. It’s not quite the same for bones as for muscles, but the principle of growth through exercise is virtually the same.

Your bones get bigger and thicker through a type of exercise known as a weight bearing exercise. These are exercises that force you to bear an increased amount of weight, weight which your bones support.

This also goes for exercises where you jump, such as jumping jacks, because each time you land on both your feet, gravity and your weight pulls them towards the ground, and puts an increased amount of stress on your bones, which effectively translates into an increased amount of weight being put on your bones.

This weight bearing type of exercise causes your osteoblasts, the cells in your bones which produce bone matter, to lay down more matter. This ends up making your bones denser and thus stronger, and also bigger and thicker too. The end result is that some simple jumping jacks can make your bones a whole lot more resilient towards anything you can throw at them.

Building stronger bones is especially important as you get older and your bones naturally get more brittle. Doing some jumping jacks now can make the difference between a simple bruise and a whole broken bone, not to mention that bone building exercises also help to stave off conditions such as degenerative bone diseases in the future.

Benefit #8: They Are Part Of A Bigger Plan

Yet another great thing about jumping jacks is that they help motivate you to exercise more. Let’s face it, jumping jacks are great exercises, but it’s not like you are going to spend a full hour or even 30 minutes straight doing jumping jacks. While you aren’t going to spend all that long doing jumping jacks, it will most likely motivate you to do some other things too.

It’s a good way to break into a solid workout routine that will end up making you a lot healthier in the long run. You can always start by doing some jumping jacks then slowly add on some more exercises to the routine, eventually creating a whole circuit that will have you healthy and fit in no time at all.

Benefit #9: Jumping Jacks Are For Everybody

The fact that jumping jacks can be done by anybody and everybody is a short and sweet testament to their versatility as a type of exercise. People of all ages can do jumping jacks because when done with care they can be a fairly unchallenging exercise.

Benefit #10: You Can Increase Their Intensity

The next benefit of doing jumping jacks is that you can easily increase their intensity to make them harder and help you build muscle even more as time goes on. You can start out by doing just a few jumping jacks, then you can do more, then you can add some wrist weights and ankle weights, and you can even add a weighted vest too.

The beauty is that you can always add heavier ankle and wrist weights, and you can always increase the weight of the vest too. This is great because it is not an exercise that tops out at a certain level. You can keep making it harder and harder, thus serving as a never ending training tool.

Benefit #11: They Can Help Make Your Happier

The final benefit we want to mention quickly is that jumping jacks can help make you a happier, less depressed, and less anxious person. Many forms of physical exercise such as this one cause your brain to release an excessive number of certain neurochemicals.

Serotonin, dopamine, and endocannabinoids are among the most important of the chemicals released when you exercise.

These chemicals have the effect of elevating your mood, giving you a better sense of relaxation, making you feel elated, and can even help reduce pain. It is a well-known fact that exercise is a great treatment for things like anxiety and depression. This whole phenomenon is what any people know as the runner’s high.

Conclusion

If you haven’t already started doing jumping jacks, stop reading this sentence and get up right now! They really are way too good of an exercise to pass up on for so many reasons. The benefits of jumping jacks are virtually endless and they will turn you into a stronger, healthier, and happier person.

If you have any questions or comments about jumping jacks, feel free to leave us a blurb below and we will get back to you as soon as possible!