How Exercise Can Make Your Heart Healthy
How Exercise Can Make Your Heart Healthy
Due to poor lifestyle, eating habits, low quality food, stressed life, medical problems like diabetes, hypertension, and heart diseases have become a norm. There are various risk factors that increase the probability of heart disease. However, indulging in different kinds of physical exercises for the heart may reduce the risk of heart diseases.
Exercise doesn’t just make you look better, it makes you feel better as well, physically, mentally, and emotionally. Let’s see how it aids your heart health.
Benefits of exercises for heart
Regular exercise does not just strengthen muscles, but it also helps the heart function better. Let’s Check out the following benefits of exercises for the heart:
Controls Hypertension: High blood pressure increases the risk of heart diseases. High blood pressure damages the heart and puts excessive pressure on it. Regular physical activity such as 150 minutes a week, or about 30 minutes most days of the week can lower your blood pressure by about 5 to 8 mm Hg. But make sure that you’re consistent because if you stop exercising, your blood pressure can rise again. Regular physical activity can bring your blood pressure down to safer levels. If you have high blood pressure, cardiovascular exercise may help lower it and if you don’t have high blood pressure, exercise may help prevent it from rising with age.
Improves Blood flow: Consistent cardio exercises improve the blood flow in the heart and in the small vessels around it, where blockages of fat deposits in the form of plaques can build over time. Better circulation in these areas reduces the risk of heart attacks significantly. There is mounting evidence that exercise can cause the body to create more physical connections between these small blood vessels, providing more ways for blood to travel.
Lowers cholesterol: Exercise is linked to increasing the amount of healthy HDL cholesterol and possibly lowering bad LDL cholesterol by as much as 10 %.
Reduce the incidence of heart arrhythmia: A common heart rhythm problem, AFib comes with a five-fold increased risk of stroke caused by a blood clot. A study by the American Heart Association has reported that patients who exercised regularly with a short-term, high-intensity interval training regimen, experienced an incidence of AFib 50% less often.
Best exercises for the heart
Aerobic exercise like brisk walking, running, swimming, cycling, playing tennis, and jumping rope, improves circulation. This results in lowered blood pressure and increased heart rate. How much: ideally, a minimum of 30 minutes a day, for at least five days a week. Do these for around 150 minutes per week.
Heart Rate During Exercise
To determine your ideal running heart rate, you need to calculate your maximum heart rate.
Maximum heart = 220 – Age in years. If you’re 35 years old, your maximum heart rate would be 185. This is just a guide, though. Your maximum heart rate may vary from 15 to 20 bpm (beats per min) in either direction. The American Heart Association recommends heart rate during exercise should be 50 to 75 percent of your maximum heart rate for beginners in moderately intense exercise.
Keep doing exercises for the heart to keep your heart healthy and monitor heart rate during exercise.
