If you want a longer life, keep your body healthier. Your heart plays an important role in your overall health and ability to function. Making small changes for a healthier heart also improves other areas of your body and allows you to be more active, which improves your heart health even more. It’s all connected and continuous. It’s never too late to get started, but the older you are, the slower the changes will occur. It’s all about living healthy every day.
Your heart needs a workout regularly to be its strongest, just as all muscles do.
When you workout, muscles get stronger, including the heart. Besides getting stronger, it gets more efficient, too. Exercising increases circulation throughout the body, including to the heart. That improves the dilation of the arteries that send blood to the heart. The more dilated your arteries are, the lower your blood pressure is. Since high blood pressure can lead to heart disease, lower blood pressure is important. The longer you workout, the better your heart muscle becomes at getting oxygen from the blood and the more your body controls the sympathetic nervous system.
Eating healthier is another change you can make for your heart.
At first, it may not seem changing your diet is simple, but it really can be. Don’t overthink it. Just start by cutting out processed foods and foods that contain white flour and added sugar. It’s simple, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy. Those two changes can make a huge difference in your health. While most physicians recommend a low sodium diet for lowering blood pressure and a healthy heart, a low sugar diet is just as beneficial. Add more fruits and vegetables to your meals and choose them in a rainbow of colors.
Fat has been vilified, but it’s necessary for a healthy heart.
People often mistakenly choose low fat or no fat foods to help their heart, but those same foods are often high in added sugar to make them palatable. You need healthy fat in your diet. In fact, butter made from milk from grass fed cows improves heart health, since it contains higher amounts of CLA—conjugated linoleic acid—which is heart healthy. It also is high in omega3 fatty acids, another heart healthy fat. Unsaturated fat helps boost healthy blood cholesterol levels and reduce unhealthy ones.
- Keep moving. If you sit longer than fifty minutes in a row, you could be wiping out the benefits of exercise and eroding your health if you don’t exercise. Get up and move for five minutes every 50-55 minutes.
- Reduce your exercise time and boost your endurance with high intensity interval training—HIIT. Studies show HIIT can get you into shape faster. It’s a technique that can be used with any exercise. You workout at top intensity for minute or two and then the same amount of time in recovery mode.
- Learn to relax and eliminate the effects of stress. Learning simple techniques like meditation and breathing exercises can help reduce stress. Stress takes a toll on your heart health.
- Get adequate sleep. Not only does lack of sleep cause you to gain weight by diminishing leptin, the hormone that makes you feel full and increasing ghrelin, the one that makes you hungry, it’s also heart healthy.
For more information, contact us today at Rising Fitness Gym