Exercises can do wonders for your body. It can decrease your body weight, or increase your fitness, and most importantly it will make your heart function healthy and smooth.
Maintaining a healthy heart is important. The damage or malfunctioning of the heart will cause a huge blow to the total body health.
Why Is Exercise Important For A Healthy Heart?
Contents
In this article, we are going to discuss the benefits, types, and some guidelines of exercises and their contribution to overall heart health.
What Are The Benefits Of Exercise?
- It helps to improve blood circulation
- Burn calories
- Reduce bad cholesterol (LDL) and increase good cholesterol (HDL)
- Contributes benefits to your overall heart health
How To Start Exercising?
Exercise will help you not only for a good heart but also for overall body health. Starting exercise is not a big and time taking task. You can start exercising today itself.
You can go through a lighter exercise or workouts and climb to heavier, or just keep the lighter one if it does the work.
Exercise like walking, yoga, cycling, swimming, weight training helps to improve your overall heart health.
Walking
Walking is a great method to strengthen your heart. Walking fast will help to increase your heart rate. One of the best advantages of walking as an exercise is that there are no specific requirements for this. You can walk anytime and anywhere freely.
Swimming
Swimming is a type of aerobic exercise that helps not only your body’s healthy, but also your heart. This full-body workout is easier to do compared to some other exercises.
Yoga
Yoga is a type of flexible exercise that directly doesn’t contribute to your heart health, but does indirectly. Yoga will help to strengthen your body. And certain types of yoga will help to lower your blood pressure.
Weight training
Pushups, situps, squats, chin-ups will not only help to build your muscle but also contribute a lot to your heart health. These types of exercise also help to burn your body fat, which in turn improves the health of the heart.
Cycling
Cycling is a type of aerobic exercise that is easy and fun to do. This exercise will help you to elevate your heart rate and improve your health.
There are majorly three categories of exercise that will help you to maintain good heart health, and keep your heart away from stroke and other heart diseases.
Aerobic exercise
Aerobic exercise will improve blood circulation and also help to control your blood sugar level. This cardio exercise can be a great help to reduce blood pressure.
Aerobic exercises include:
- Brisk walking
- Running
- Swimming
- Jumping rope
- Cycling
- Dancing
- Tennis play
- And even gardening
The individual is requested to do the exercise at least 30 minutes per day and at least 5 days a week.
Strength work
Strength work or training (also called resistance training ) will help you to reduce fat in the body which in turn helps to keep your heart healthy.
The ideal exercise includes
- Pushups, squats, chin-ups, situps, etc
- Using Weight machines
- Working out with the help of free weights
- Body resistance exercise including using resistance bands
The resistance/ strength training along with some aerobics may help to reduce or lower the Bad cholesterol( LDL) and increase the good cholesterol ( HDL).
The exercise is recommended to perform on two nonconsecutive days of a week.
Flexibility
Flexibility training or exercise will help your heart health indirectly. Flexibility helps you to get rid of joint and other muscular pains and cramps.
Flexibility training contributes a lot to your heart health as well as improves your body balance and flexibility.
There are a number of online resources that help you to do the exercise, including the videos on youtube and on TVs. Taichi, yoga, and pilates are also a part of Flexibility training. Flexibility exercises can be done every day before or after exercise.
Conclusion
Exercise does not only help your overall body health but also contributes a lot to the health and improvement of heart function.
You can either go for simple exercise like walking, swimming or cycling or you can go for some weight training. Simple exercises are affordable and easy to carry out. But exercises like weight training may require joining a gym.
Find some suitable and comfortable exercises from the above list, and go for it. Each of them provides its own benefits to your body and heart.
Lacey Arlo is a wellness expert and a nutritionist who aims to help members with health and diet queries. Lacey Arlo has worked with junior, national, and Olympic-level athletes by providing them with customizing programmers, supplement strategies, and support during their travel and competition. From weight management, PCOD, thyroid-related weight loss, and nutrition for children to diets for pregnant and diets for senior citizens, She offers nutrition-aided solutions for different age groups with consideration for each person’s unique health demands.