It’s hard to overstate the importance of exercise when it comes to your health, especially your cardiovascular health. While it’s all well and good to simply say, “Exercise is good for your heart,” we thought we’d take a closer look to really drive the point home.
The team here at Humble Cardiology Associates, under the direction of Dr. Madaiah Revana, is invested in your cardiovascular health, and we can do our part here to ensure that everything is functioning smoothly. What you do on your own, however, especially through diet and exercise, can make our jobs infinitely easier and change the course of your health for the better.
Here’s a look at why exercise is so important for your cardiovascular health.
One of the first benefits of exercise is its role in helping with your circulation. Your heart has an extremely hard task — it circulates the 6 quarts of blood throughout your body three times every minute! To do this, your heart beats about 100,000 times a day sending your blood on a daily trip that covers about 12,000 miles.
If you lead a sedentary lifestyle, your heart and blood vessels have to work harder to circulate your blood. While it may seem counterintuitive that raising your heart rate during exercise is going to help your cardiovascular health, this conditioning actually lowers your overall heart rate, especially when you’re at rest.
As well, with your blood flowing freely and easily, you’re less likely to develop blockages in your arteries (such as coronary artery disease) and venous insufficiency.
One of the biggest dangers when it comes to your cardiovascular health is overwhelming your system with too many fats. When your body can’t process the amount of fat you take in, the excess ends up forming fatty deposits (plaque) inside your arteries, which leads to atherosclerosis.
Since your arteries are responsible for delivering blood from your heart to the rest of your body, your heart has to work harder to push blood through when they’re blocked.
Through exercise, you can burn more fat and avoid clogging your blood vessels.
This helps to lower your blood pressure and cholesterol numbers, which is imperative because, when these numbers are high, you’re at risk for serious heart disease and heart attack.
Another way that exercise can improve your cardiovascular health is that it helps prevent diseases like diabetes. Through exercise, you can help your body better regulate the glucose levels in your blood to prevent plaque buildup.
When you exercise and build muscles through strength training, you increase the ability of your muscles to draw oxygen from your blood. Without good muscle health, your heart has to work much harder to deliver oxygen to these tissues.
The final benefit of exercise we want to cover here is stress reduction. When you’re stressed, your body is stuck in a fight-or-flight mode, and exercise is a great way to break out of this unhealthy state, which raises your blood pressure.
Of course, there are many more benefits of exercise for your cardiovascular health, but we think the above points make up a fairly good argument for adding a little activity to your daily routine. If you have more questions, please contact one of our two offices in Humble or Houston, Texas.
