A healthy heart is the key to overall good health. Embracing a healthy lifestyle at any age can prevent heart disease and lower your risk for a heart attack or stroke- you are never too old or too young to begin taking care of your heart. For most adults, ways to take care of your heart consist of:
• Getting around 150 minutes of moderate-intensity exercise, like brisk walking
• 75 minutes of high-intensity exercise like running each week
• Two weekly sessions of strength training.
But what is the impact of regular exercise on the heart, and how does it contribute to your body’s overall health? Check out these seven reasons why focusing on your heart health is important to your overall health.
1. Lowers blood pressure
A healthy heart pushes out more blood as it beats, enabling it to function better. This decreases stress on the heart and arteries, potentially reducing blood pressure. If you have high blood pressure, exercise can help lower it. If you don’t have high blood pressure, exercise may help prevent it from rising.
2. Improves blood flow
Regular cardio-based physical activity enables the heart to achieve improved blood flow in the vessels around it, where blockages can build over time. Better circulation in these areas can prevent heart attacks. Exercise can also cause the body to create more connections between blood vessels, meaning the blood has more ways to travel to where it needs to.
3. Decreases risk of heart disease, diabetes, and stroke
Studies show that regular exercise helps reduce the risk of heart disease and stroke. Regular exercise also helps keep blood sugar levels in a healthy range and, therefore, helps lower the risk for pre-diabetes and type 2 diabetes.
4. Reduces inflammation
With regular exercise, chronic inflammation is reduced as the body adapts to the challenge of exercise. This plays an integral role in reducing the effects of many of the diseases mentioned above.
5. Weight control
Especially when combined with a smart diet, being physically active is an essential component for losing weight and even more important for keeping it off, which in turn helps optimize your heart health. Being overweight puts stress on the heart and is a risk factor for heart disease and stroke.
6. Lowers stress
Stress hormones can put a burden on the heart. Exercise, whether aerobic, resistance-oriented, or flexibility-focused, can help you relax and ease stress.
7. Helps strengthen muscles
A combination of aerobic workouts and strength training is considered the best for heart health, as these exercises improve the muscles’ ability to get oxygen from the circulating blood. That reduces the need for the heart (a muscular organ itself,) to work harder to pump more blood to the muscles, no matter what age you are.
It’s safe to say that your body benefits from cardiovascular exercise in more ways than one. If you are looking to optimize your heart health, be sure to incorporate cardiovascular exercise in your everyday routine.