How does exercise affect heart health?

Your heart health depends on multiple factors. Poor nutrition choices, mental health stressors, and negative lifestyle practices can all affect your heart and increase the risk of cardiovascular diseases. Some of the best ways to maintain your heart health are by engaging in physical activities like exercise and by maintaining a healthy diet. 

Even if you suffer from conditions like Atrial Fibrillation (AFib), exercise is essential to improving your heart health. It reduces the severity of AFib episodes, lowers blood pressure, and slows the resting heart rate.

Exercise and Its Significance to Heart Health

If you remain physically inactive it may lead to an increased risk (ref. link) of heart disease, type 2 diabetes, stroke, lung cancer, and early death. Exercise is an efficient way to prevent such fatalities and maintain a healthy lifestyle. Taking time out for 2-3 exercise sessions a week helps reduce weight, improve blood pressure, decrease cardiovascular mobility, and ensure that your heart does not face any challenges in pumping blood and oxygen throughout the body.

Your heart beats faster when you exercise, increasing blood circulation and oxygen supply to your muscles. This is because your heart is attempting to match the demand for blood/oxygen created by physical activity. Training consistently trains your heart to be able to contract at a higher force as it gets used to the increased demands. As such, your heart health improves, and you’re able to physically exert yourself to a greater extent.

Exercise and Heart Health

Exercise sessions can affect your heart health positively in various ways.

• Helps Lower Blood Pressure
  Exercising reduces blood vessel stiffness and allows the blood to flow easily inside your body. Walking, jogging, cycling, and swimming are some of the best physical activities that help lower blood pressure and improve your heart health.

• Enhances Blood Flow
  Cardiovascular exercises enable enhanced blood flow from the heart into the smaller vessels surrounding it. They also prevent fatty deposit blockages and allow better blood circulation to avoid heart attacks. Exercise helps create better connections between small blood vessels, and creates more paths for the blood to travel across your body. Studies (ref. link) also reveal that exercise boosts blood flow to the brain and helps adults slow the onset of memory loss.

• Improves Oxygen Supply
  Given its significance, it’s important to reiterate that exercise also makes your heart and lungs work harder to supply more oxygen that your muscles demand. Regular exercise also helps your body recover quickly by increasing blood flow and reducing fatigue.

• Reduced Risk of Stroke, Diabetes, and Heart Diseases
  Studies (ref. link) show that routine exercise helps reduce the risk of coronary heart disease in men and women. Moreover, active individuals have a 20% (ref. link) lower chance of having a stroke. Exercise also helps keep your blood sugar levels in a healthier range, and lowers the risk of prediabetes or type 2 diabetes.
  Exercise sessions are one of the best options for people with AFib or atrial fibrillation because they help keep the condition in check. Research (ref. link) reveals that people who are fit experience fewer AFib episodes than those with lower fitness levels.

• Increases High-Density Lipoprotein (HDL) or Good Cholesterol
  Exercise sessions can help you lose weight and lower your triglyceride fats that increase your HDL levels. Studies (ref. link) suggest that 60-minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic exercise a week can help increase the amount of good cholesterol in your body. Strength training and high-intensity exercises also help raise HDL levels and improve your heart’s arterial functions.

Exercises that Boost Heart Health

Physical activities are one of the most effective ways to strengthen your heart muscles, keep your weight under control, and ward off artery damage related to high cholesterol, high blood pressure, or diabetes.

Here are the top three exercises that can help boost your heart health. 

• Aerobic Exercise
  Aerobic exercises help improve blood circulation and lower blood pressure. They also reduce the risk of stroke and type 2 diabetes by impacting your blood glucose levels. Work towards aerobically exercising for 30 minutes a day, at least five days a week. Swimming, cycling, brisk walking, jumping rope, etc., are some examples of aerobic exercises.

• Resistance Training
  Resistance training positively impacts your body composition, helps reduce fat, and creates lean muscle mass. Research (ref. link) also proves that a combination of aerobic exercises and resistance training helps increase good cholesterol and lower bad cholesterol in the body.
  According to the American College of Sports Medicine (ref. link), you should undergo resistance training at least two non-consecutive days a week. Resistance training can involve the use of free weights, weight machines, resistance bands, or even engaging in bodyweight exercises like squats or push ups.

• Yoga
  Stretching your body through yoga asanas can benefit your musculoskeletal and heart health.  Practising yoga can help lower blood cholesterol, blood pressure, glucose levels, heart rate, increase flexibility, and prevent cramps and joint pain. Flexibility and stretching also play a vital role in maintaining postures during aerobic exercises and resistance training activities.
  The best part about yoga is that you can do it before or after your regular exercise sessions. Yoga asanas like the chair pose, tree pose, bridge pose, and mountain pose are some of the most recommended physical activities for a healthy heart.

Bottom Line

Regular exercise positively impacts your heart health. However, the best way to incorporate cardiovascular activities into your lifestyle is by consulting a health expert. You can take your physician’s assistance to create a plan that gradually increases your capacity to do cardiovascular exercise. This also enables you to establish a baseline for your resting heart rate, blood pressure, and cholesterol to track your fitness cycle.

Studies (ref. link) have proved that increased physical activities reduce the risk of age-related cardiovascular diseases. Exercise sessions help reduce stress hormones that may affect the heart. They work as beta blockers to slow your heart rate and lower blood pressure. 

Finally, purchase the revolutionary Frontier X2 heart health and fitness tracker to maximise the health benefits of your exercise routine.

Other Heart Health Topics To Explore:

Silent heart attack | Heart Rate Monitor Device | Heart Health| Resting Heart Rate  | Healthy Heart Tips | Paroxysmal Atrial Fibrillation | Increased Heart rate | Irregular Heartbeat causes | AFib and Heart | Best Heart Rate Monitor

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