Exercise and heart health

Exercise and heart health

Your heart is at the heart of your health. Everything affects its health from your weight to your mental state. That’s why when you are extremely sad or upset, you feel a crushing weight in your chest. So, maintaining overall health becomes crucial to maintaining heart health, and exercise goes a long way in preserving your wellbeing.

Regular exercise is one of the best ways to keep your heart healthy. While exercising may make your heart beat faster and work harder, it also does a lot of other things to keep your heart in good condition.

So, what does exercise do for your heart?
Three very important things. It helps you
• Lose excess weight
• Keep your blood pressure under control
• Manage or stop diabetes.

These factors will help your heart tremendously. How? Let’s see.
Take a weight off its shoulders

One of the most important goals you achieve by exercising is losing excess weight. The excess weight you carry puts an enormous strain on your body, especially your heart. It has to work really hard to pump blood throughout your body. This strain increases the risk of heart attacks. By helping you shed your excess weight, exercise takes a weight off your heart greatly reducing the risk of cardiovascular diseases.

Lower work pressure

As you exercise and burn up calories, your blood pressure may be high, but it will lower during resting periods. As you get in the groove, your blood pressure and heart rate will not increase too much even while you exercise. When your blood pressure is maintained at normal or near normal levels, your heart will be able will function easily without strain. This will keep your heart healthy and happy reducing the risk of heart disease.

Control blood sugar

Uncontrolled blood sugar levels damage the heart and increase the risk of heart attacks. When you exercise, you increase the ability of your muscles to process glycogen. This will reduce the amount of glycogen in your blood. This alone reduces the risk of diabetes by 50%. If you are diabetic, regular exercise and an active lifestyle combined with healthy diet will help manage blood sugar levels, greatly reducing the risk of heart disease.

In addition to these three main benefits, exercise is a good stressbuster and helps you stay healthy mentally. Stress is a major risk factor for cardiovascular conditions including heart attacks and strokes. By reducing stress, exercise provides ambient conditions for your heart keeping it healthy.

You don’t need to join a gym and do strenuous workouts to exercise. While this may work for some, it is not the only way to keep your heart healthy. Regular walking, jogging, climbing stairs, swimming, dancing, games like tennis etc. are enough. Aim to exercise most days of the week. If you are just starting, check with your doctor before taking up any strenuous workouts. Start slowly and gradually increase duration as your body starts adjusting and gaining strength.

So, next time you have to go up some floors, use the stairs. If you are driving, park your car a little distance from your destination and walk from there. If you have a sedentary job, get up periodically and walk around for a few minutes. In addition to these activities, set aside some time everyday and take up some form of exercise. Your heart will thank you.

For all heart related problems and doubts, contact our experts. We will guide you to a heart healthy lifestyle.